Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) (5 page)

“And?”

“I’m not sure, just an odd feeling.”

“If your odd feeling gets and definition, let me know.
In the meantime let’s glean what we can from the scraps here, and keep your
eyes open for anything on these Marauders. If you can manage a date with a bit
of snuggle time go for it. There are at least two girls out there.”

“Plenty of guys then,” Levi deflected.

“You romanced me out.”

“Could just try a friendly hug outside of armor?”

“Or a punch…but I don’t have an excuse for that yet.
Just try and find some way to get some skin contact.”

“Your
spidey
senses
tingling?”

“I don’t know. They just rub me the wrong way. If
there are any good guys in this fight, it might not be them.”

“Don’t trust a quitter?”

“If they’re still interested in fighting, why did they
leave us?”

“Good point.”

“Keep your eyes open and study everything. We’re
blinder here than usual.”

“You want me to run my find back up to orbit?”

“No, but call a dropship in to pick it up. I want you
here with me snooping around.”

“Don’t think we’re going to get anyone out of armor
here. Are we going back to their basecamp?”

“Play it by ear and see where it leads,” Jenna said,
beginning to walk in the direction of the newest survivor that the
mercs
were just now getting to with their equipment, for
plasma had a way of melting hatches closed. “For now, just roam. I’ll see what
this guy can give us.”

5

October 10, 2735

Noop
System

Tieor

The pair of Archons ran together through the night,
traveling at better than 30 miles an hour as they cruised at Levi’s maximum
sustainable pace for the cross country trip. Both Archons were using their
armor’s powered enhancement to reduce the workload, making it feel as if they
were running without any extra weight on them at all. Typically they didn’t use
that setting save for extreme situations, preferring to just use their strength
to overcome the slowness of the armor, but given the distance they were running
across an uninhabited bit of countryside towards one of the Varshoo-held cities
they didn’t want to arrive there exhausted.

Jenna let Levi lead the way so he could set the pace,
given that he was the slower of the two, but she handled the navigation, giving
him a telepathic nudge to veer left at a clump of trees ahead. The padawan did
as directed, taking them a bit off the path and through some waist-high grass
before the bare dirt returned for a few strides, then was quickly replaced by
scrub brush that tickled their armor with thorns. They blew through it like a
knife blade, leaving only a small disruption for someone to follow.

That wasn’t the concern here, for so far no one had
noticed their passage. The surveillance around the captured city was aerial
only with a few loose patrols around the perimeter, meaning that if they tried
for an aerial assault they’d probably be picked up on their descent, even if
they dropped from orbit with jump packs. The long route over land was the easy
way in, but taking vehicles or going via road would have been a bit too
obvious, even at night. On foot was the preferred method, because no one
expected anyone to travel the 42 mile gap across wilderness in a single night,
let alone within two hours.

And because of the design of their armor their movements
were whisper quiet, making them literally ghosts in the night with the overhead
cloud cover masking any starlight. They both had a tiny pinprick of light on
their helmets that they could use for their
nightvision
,
in a frequency that most races couldn’t see naturally, but neither Archon
needed it, for they simply used their Pefbar to see ahead and all around them,
offering them better situational awareness within a limited radius.

Beyond that they were essentially blind, but the
tracking systems on their battlemap let Jenna navigate them to where they
needed to go, for she’d set up several waypoints based on previous orbital
scans and they were arriving at the last of them now, for just around the tree
clump she’d had Levi veer left at was a ridgeline that would run straight up to
the city edge. There it would be cut off abruptly by the infrastructure on the city’s
back side where the wilderness pressed up against the outer ring. There were a
fair amount of trees there, cutting off most vehicular traffic aside from a few
wide paths that doubled as roads for those travelers that chose to skirt around
the perimeter rather than take internal routes from point to point within the
city.

The approach made for a huge blind spot that the
invaders were basically leaving unmonitored, and to be blunt why would they
bother locking it down? They were running rough shot over the planet and
methodically taking one site after another, making it appear that it was only a
matter of time before they conquered the entire planet no matter how many
mercenaries the locals hired to try and slow them down.

Jenna still thought it was sloppy, especially
considering that those mercenary units weren’t tied down to any location and
typically would have their own transports, whether they be ships, aerial craft,
or some form of speeders. Had she been the Varshoo commander, Jenna would have
put up at least a light patrol perimeter around the city in all directions to
give the troops inside a heads up in case someone tried a counterattack, but
most of their efforts seemed to be focused on locking down the spaceports and
main roads, keeping people inside as much as keeping others out.

According to the few minds she’d been able to raid
from the Marauders’ prisoners, Jenna had determined that there were at least 18
different factions within the Varshoo army here, and many more in their overall
empire…save for that it wasn’t a civilization. They were a conglomeration of
mercenary units, security forces, defense leagues, and about anything else that
had an even vaguely military aspect to it. Each puzzle piece was put together
to form the Varshoo, which was a military for hire, so to speak. What they were
doing here she hadn’t been able to determine because the soldiers she’d
interrogated didn’t know, but this wasn’t the first planet they’d hit.

She’d found memories from 14 other assaults, all
successful and against similarly primitive civilizations. The Varshoo were
conquering designated worlds then handing them over to someone else, moving on
and repeating the process where necessary. Sometimes they’d move straight on to
another mission, others would involve holding breaks at some neutral point or
even see the puzzle pieces return to where they’d been gathered from. What was
behind it all was still uncertain, but Jenna had gathered the identities of
those higher up the ranking ladder who might know the answers to those
questions, which was why the pair of Archons were headed towards the city of
Djok
.

It was the headquarters for the faction that had been
involved with the first Skarron walker. Oddly, the other one belonged to yet
another subsection of the Varshoo, but none of the soldiers had known where it
originally came from, though they knew of others having been used in previous
missions. They were the key pieces in their assault plan, but not for the raw
military power they possessed. They were brought in after the initial attack to
demoralize the locals and hold onto a region of the planet where the Varshoo
were devoting less troops than they should. It was a bit of tactical mastery
and would have worked had the Marauders not inexplicably been able to destroy
one of them.

Jenna had tried to get some information on the ex-Star
Force unit from the Varshoo, but they knew nothing about them. They’d traveled
a long way to get to their target system, having originated entirely outside
the local geography…which was why the mercenaries had no knowledge of them
either.

Levi took to the lower side of the ridge, dodging
between trees as he followed a dry creek bed yet stayed out of view underneath
the spotted canopy, pacing the wash some ten meters or so from the edge. Jenna
could tell from his movements that he was getting tired, but his speed hadn’t
flagged yet, which meant he wasn’t too fatigued. If it started to drop off
she’d slow him even further to make sure he wasn’t going to tank on her later,
but he was holding up better than she’d thought he would. Halfway through their
run she thought he’d been overcooking it, but apparently he was a bit more
robust than she’d realized.

Then again, running at night always made things seem
faster, even when using Pefbar, for you couldn’t get any distant visual markers
to calibrate off of, just the quickly moving terrain nearby. Jenna had already
worked up a good sweat, which she could feel soaking into her minimal clothing
underneath, but she wasn’t feeling taxed and could have sped up a bit without
wearing herself out if need be. Levi might be one of the most advanced Archons
in Star Force, but she and the other mages were far beyond him, not just in
psionics, but in physical skills. Had there been a trailblazer here her role
would have been reversed, for they were likewise ahead of her, but few others
were.

She’d gotten used to being one of the dominant ones
and took to that role well, regardless of whether or not the Archon was with
her kin on a training stint or fighting who knew what race out on the frontier.
Other than the Voku, no one else even had a chance going hand to hand with her
level of skill, meaning that wherever she went she had the advantage, and the
outcome of the battles wouldn’t depend on her outfighting her opponent, but in
maneuvering the conflict into situations where she could apply her advantage.

She could kill 10 tanks single handedly if she got to
them one at a time, coming in from anonymity and getting the jump on their
pilots, but go straight in at 10 of them on a wide open battlefield and her
armor would quickly be tasked with keeping her alive long enough to run away.
She could own any hand to hand confrontation, no matter how many individuals
were involved, but Jenna still had to pick her fights…which was why they were
going into the Varshoo-held city on foot, hopefully keeping any interactions a
personal affair and not inviting any of their tanks or aircraft to the
occasion.

They made their way along the ridgeline without
incident, other than a few annoying soft spots in the ground that would sink in
on contact and threaten to trip you up. Jenna had started to press her Pefbar
down into the ground to see the little rodent tunnels to give her some warning,
but eventually just said ‘screw it’ because at the speed they were running she
didn’t have enough time to focus on such small details. Her balance was good
enough to recover when it did happen, as was Levi’s, so she just stuck behind
him a couple of steps and ate up ground until they got to the city’s edge.

The padawan slowed, finally, and began to recover his
strength as they crept up towards one of the dirt roads, keeping trees between
them and the city lights as Jenna mentally pointed him to a spot with a little
bit more elevation. On top of it was a guard post, but the two minds inside
were bored and half asleep, so not a threat. Not wanting to risk an alarm,
Jenna had them move a quarter mile around the perimeter to the north and enter
the city there, sprinting across the dirt road and sliding into one of the
building alleys that were for pedestrian traffic only.

Given that it was on the outskirts this one didn’t
have anyone using it, so the two armored Archons jogged down it with impunity,
seeing only a few doors and no windows. They took a moment to have a look up,
then both of them took to an opposite wall and began to crawl up using their
armor’s grip points, for the building sides were nearly sheer.

Jenna made it to the roof first, pulling herself up
over the edge as Levi crawled up the taller building and kicked off the wall,
jumping across the alleyway to her side and rolling out of a reverse somersault
before catching up to her as she walked across to the building side with a
larger street below. She inched her head over and looked down, finding a light
amount of traffic, mostly pedestrians who were moving with haste. They weren’t
the Varshoo, rather denizens who had been captured along with the infrastructure.
A quick mental scan on a few of them indicated that they were in no immediate
harm, but they were spooked none the less, not knowing what was coming in the
future with their new rulers.

She also realized that most of the people were staying
indoors, with only those that needed to travel about were doing so. That should
help their transit, but the agitated state the populace was in would also make
them more aware of what was going on around them. Hopefully though, that
attention wouldn’t be focused skyward.

Jenna backed up a few steps then sprinted off the
building, planting her foot on the edge and jumping with the assistance of her
armor. Levi followed a split second later and the two armored bodies flew
across the gap to land on the slightly shorter building on the far side of the
double-
laned
road.

They ran across to the next building, but given that
it was taller they had to transfer over to a side building and the alleyway
there to do their
spiderman
thing and climb up high
enough to make the next jump. One after another they made their way across the
city to the location of the Varshoo headquarters that had been set up in one of
the local buildings, but with ample security established around the block that
it was located on to deter guests.

The first sniper position they came across saw the
Varshoo soldier slumped over his weapon as Jenna walked up to him, already
having knocked him out from afar with her Ikrid. She searched his memories,
trying to determine if any of the people on their ‘to find’ list were inside.
As far as this one knew at least some of them were, so the Archons eased up to
the edge of the building and looked across the wide street to the buildings on
the far side. The one they wanted was behind those, but the gap was too far to
jump…and neither of them had brought a jump pack.

“Pole vault or slingshot?” Jenna asked, giving Levi
his preference.

“You think I can make the roof, or have to shoot for
the wall?”

“I’m thinking wall.”

“Pole vault then. Softer landing.”

“Alright, get ready while I blanket the area,” she
said, her eyes
disfocusing
as she reached out with
her Ikrid searching for all nearby minds. Any that had a line of sight on the
street she hacked into, planting a little bit of programming that would
disincline them from looking up. The effect would last anywhere from a few
seconds to a few minutes depending on the race. Given that she was unfamiliar
with these they probably only had a short window of opportunity, but it should
be enough so long as something didn’t attract their attention, otherwise it
would break the little spell she was weaving on them.

It took too long for her to get through them all, with
the first ones being questionable as to whether they were still affected or
not, but Jenna gave Levi the go ahead anyway and he started running from the
far side of their building roof where he had been waiting. She offered out a
battlemeld prompt and he immediately took it, syncing their minds and giving
them access to other psionics. Using
Bataf
, which the
Archons typically referred to as ‘
repulsor
,’ Jenna
pushed her hands out towards Levi and emitted an invisible column of energy
linking to him. It was loose at first, then with their linked precision it
instantaneously hardened as he jumped, becoming the ‘pole’ that he rode up into
the air as Jenna gave him a telekinetic kick in the butt on the way up to add
to his momentum.