Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) (8 page)

“We came here for the
intel
,
not the war, but you’re welcome. Just don’t try to use that thing without some
practice. It’d be a shame if you broke it the first mission out.”

“We’ll take real good care of it, you can count on
that. Do you want us to take the crew?”

“No, we’ll be dropping them off on our way out.”

“Where?”

“Near one of their bases.”

“Why not a prison?”

“We stole their ride. We’re not taking sides. You get
the walker because I trust you. I don’t have the same confidence with the local
defense force.”

“You mean what’s left of them.”

“From here on out you’re on your own. If the Varshoo
bring in any other toys, we’re not coming back to deal with them.”

“Fair enough,” he said as Levi came down with the last
one and handed him off to the commandos, then walked up beside Jenna.

“Keys are in the ignition.”

“Control keys?” Brayden asked.

“Just an expression,” Jenna answered. “You can figure
out the details on your own.”

Without another word the pair walked off towards their
dropship, but Brayden wasn’t going to leave it at that.

“Not to sound like an ingrate,” he shouted after them,
“but I get the feeling you don’t like us very much.”

Jenna turned around. “No, I don’t.”

“Why?”

“You’re a quitter,” she said flatly.

“If we weren’t out here, the frontier would be a
little
more messier
than it is now.”

“Not the point.”

“So you just don’t like the fact that we’re doing
things on our own now?”

“If I didn’t think you were doing some good, I
wouldn’t be giving you the walker.”

“So why the animosity?”

“You left the team, and now you want me to treat you
like you’re still one of us. You can’t have it both ways. You wanted out, now
you’re out.”

“So that’s the way it is?”

“That’s the way it is,” Jenna echoed.

“As you wish,” Brayden said, putting his helmet back
on.

Jenna turned around and walked off towards the waiting
dropship with Levi, leaving the
mercs
to do their
thing and wanting to get away from the mess of a planet that was
Tieor
.

8

October 14, 2735

Ma’kri
Jor
-El

Mid Jump

Jenna twirled her stun sword around once, accelerating
the top half of the loop and using the force to negate the sideways slash from
Levi’s double-bladed weapon. The two tubular blades met with a slight ping as
the energy matrixes met and canceled each other out, resulting in no flow of
the energy with the physical contact. The sound was muted, for the swords were
set to a very low setting, but still there was a bit of FX where every blade
crossed, adding a bit of energy to the rather standard training drill.

Levi held the blades together for a moment, then
reverse-slashed with the other half of his weapon, aiming for Jenna’s right shoulder
as he tried to keep pressure on her blade to delay its movement. The mage
wasn’t so easily suckered, and she took a half step back before she pushed off
a few inches and snapped her blade across her body and blocked the second hit
from the double sword with another ping on contact.

Then it was Levi’s turn to
backstep
as he reset himself with a twirl of his twin blades around the safe central
portion of the sword. He didn’t take long to lunge back in, blade pointed
towards Jenna’s midsection in a jab attempt that he knew she would easily
block. When she did, batting the blade aside and setting herself up for a
possible slash of her own with a step to his left, the padawan dropped down
onto his heels and spun, bringing the other side of his sword around behind him
toward her legs.

Jenna hopped over it, but while she was in the air
Levi had a movement advantage and used it to enhance his spin, so that when she
did land the other side of his body had rotated around and brought the back
half of the sword with it, headed towards the side of her leg as she landed. It
didn’t hit, for Jenna had dropped her own sword alongside her leg to catch the
blow, but Levi pushed hard and got his master’s own blade to move towards her
leg and nip at her boot.

Jenna felt a tingle of numbness enter her foot, but it
wasn’t enough to trip her up. She responded by yanking her foot back and
planting the tip of her sword into the floor of the training room, using the
solid rod to pivot on while Levi twirled back in reverse to stand himself up.
With the elder Archon now leaning forward, she let go pressure on the sword and
used her off balance stance to propel herself forward as she brought the sword
across to her other side, tip pointed down to catch Levi’s blade whether he was
intending to hit her or not.

A step later and she was inside his swinging arc,
bringing her right knee up and nailing him in the gut. With a telekinetic tug
she threw him off her knee and onto his butt, landing her sword in the crevice
between his chin and chest, an inch and a half away from touching his throat.
She pulled back immediately, having finished that maneuver on reflex more than
intent, and stood a couple meters away while he stood up.

“Sorry,” she offered, for this training session wasn’t
supposed to be a full blown sparring match.

“So much for defense only,” Levi commented. “What’s
wrong?”

“Just a little twitchy.”

“Why?” he asked, bringing half of his sword up in
front of him in a guard stance, with Jenna likewise resuming a defensive
position.

I don’t know
,
she said telepathically as Levi came back at her, making two quick slashes with
the same side of the sword before throwing in a reverse that forced Jenna to
switch her sword from one side of her body to the other.
But that was a good hit.

You had it
blocked
, he said, continuing to lightly spar with her, focusing on the
transition between movements more than the force of the blows.

Not well enough.

That’s my point.
What’s wrong?

Jenna focused a bit more and met the next three
slashes with crisp returns, then added force to the fourth, nearly knocking the
double blade out of Levi’s hands as she batted it away to her left.

“It’s not me, it’s you,” she said aloud. “It’s like
you’re not trying very hard, so I ease off then you slip it back up. If you’re
doing it on purpose I’ll beat the crap out of you, but I don’t think you are.”

Levi winced. “Actually, I was.”

Jenna glared at him. “That’s not the point of this
drill.”

“No it’s not, but something isn’t right with you so I
was probing. And when I made a hit you seemed to take it personally.”

Jenna swung her sword to the side, lowering it almost
to
where the point touched the floor, and raised her other
hand in exasperation. “I guess I just don’t like walking away from a fight.”

“Who does? That shouldn’t throw you off your game.
Your head’s not fully into the training, you’re just acting out of reflex…and
not to brag too much, but I’m too strong and know your techniques too well for
you to hold me off with even a slightly
disfocused
effort.”

Jenna shut the power off on her sword, then retracted
it back down into the handle. “Part of my head is still back on
Tieor
. We had to walk away, but part of me still thinks we
should be back there saving lives rather than here training.”

“So we go back then,” Levi said simply.

“And do what?”

 
“You tell me.”

“No, don’t give me that bullshit. If you have a
suggestion just spit it out.”

“I don’t, actually. But if you feel like we need to be
there, then why not go back and see what we can do to help out.”

“We’ve already taken out the walker. What more would
you suggest?”

“I suggest you quit beating around the bush and tell
me what’s really bothering you.”

Jenna put her hands on her hips, starting to get
annoyed, but as she thought it through she realized Levi was right.

“I think I screwed up.”

Her apprentice frowned. “How?”

“By picking a side.”

“We didn’t kill anyone, and the Varshoo have no
business invading planets and killing people, no matter what their situation is
back home.”

“But that walker we gave the
mercs
will kill people, which means we did take a side and got involved in the
fight…then didn’t fully commit.”

“I’m sure there’s plenty of war to go around if you
want to go back and pick up where we left off.”

Jenna shook her head. “We can’t, and you know it.”

“I do know it, but apparently part of your head
doesn’t.”

“Then explain it for me.”

Levi deactivated and retracted his sword, then tossed
the extra-long hilt aside onto the mat. He counted off points on his fingers.

“One, we’re not going to help the Varshoo take over
the planet. If that was ever an objective we’d have to do it without killing
anyone, and we don’t have the means to do that out here. We could help them
take over and reduce the losses to the native population, but we’d still be
assisting those in the bloodshed, which is unacceptable.”

“Two, we can’t defend the planet for the same reason.
If this was a lizard invasion it would be different, because we kill those
bastards on sight. Skarrons more or less the same thing. The Varshoo aren’t our
enemy. Maybe they deserve to be, but they’re not right now, and we go through a
series of procedures to deal with ‘not so friendlies,’ which we’re not in a
position to do here.”

“Three,
Tieor
isn’t an ally.
If it was, we’d fight whoever was attacking them. Are they on the defense, yes,
and that makes me, at least, sympathetic to their plight and wanting to assist,
but if we’re going to fight a war to save them it has to be our kind of war. We
can’t do that here, other than in small respects, and those would be aiding a
planet full of people that might very well go attack someone else later. Maybe
this attack is a reprisal for one that
Tieor
made
against the Varshoo. Until we can determine who is in the right, all we can do
is block the fighting through nonlethal means. Can we do that for the entire
planet?”

“No,” Jenna admitted.

“Four, we have the mercenaries. There are a lot
involved in the fighting, but having one unit made up of our former brothers
and sisters throws a wrinkle on the situation. I want to view them as allies,
but they left and are not entirely trustworthy simply for that fact. I have to
keep myself from making the mistake of treating them like other commandos. They
may have been once, but they’re not now. My gut says to aid them in battle, and
leaving definitely doesn’t feel right if you’re looking at it simply from that
perspective.”

“Five, we came here to track down the Skarron link,
and there is none. Our original mission is complete, but because we involved
ourselves with the
mercs
we got entangled in a fight
that we didn’t finish. I know that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, but
we did save them from having to take on the second walker by themselves. It
probably would have trashed what was left of their unit if they tried, and they
were definitely going to try after taking down the first one. We threw our
former guys a bone, simple as that.”

“And what if they use that bone to hurt somebody they
shouldn’t?”

“The same could be said of the Hycre when we gave them
cleansing beams. We can’t monitor everything they do.”

“I wasn’t the one that made that call.”

“And I wasn’t the one that made the call on the
walker,” Levi added. “But I agree with it. Those
mercs
are the only partially honorable part involved in that war. Better to leave it
in their hands than the Varshoo.”

“When you put it that way it seems pretty simple.”

“It is simple, when you analyze it.”

“Thank you. I’m more of a counterpuncher than
anything, so you made things a lot clearer by laying it out and letting me
react to the logic rather than trying to produce it.”

“So you’re good now?”

“Yes,” she said, pushing the button on her stun sword
and extending the blade, followed by a whisper of a ping when the energy
activated. Levi telekinetically pulled his back into his hands and brandished
both blades, then ran a step towards her and began a series of hits and counter
hits, seeing in evidence her returned focus.

He amped up his intensity, applying more power to each
hit, and she responded in kind for more than a minute, then she quickly shifted
to offense and proved yet again why she was the master and he the apprentice,
for she got inside his defenses within five moves, then shoved an open palm
into his chest, knocking him backwards and adding to it with a telekinetic
shove that took him further away from her, but Levi did manage to remain on his
feet.

“We are so going back,” she said, standing her ground.

Levi looked at her for a moment with a blank
expression, then a grin spread across his face. “You have a plan?”

“It’s amazing how clear your mind can become when you
decide to say ‘fuck it all,’” she said, waving him forward with her free hand
as she set herself into a guard pose with the blade level over her head.

“What am I missing?” he said, readying himself for
another lunging attack.

“A bit of recklessness.”

Levi considered that for a moment, then his eyes went
wide with understanding. “No way.”

“Yes way, youngling.”

“It won’t work.”

“Probably not…which is what makes it a worthy
challenge.”

“And if we fail?”

“Hence the reckless part.”

Levi raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”

“I’m through letting circumstances dictate my actions.
Time we do the dictating,” she said, waving him forward again.

Levi twirled the double blades around. “You lead, I’ll
follow,” he said just before launching himself at her and engaging in another
rapid fire crisscrossing of stun blades.

When the
Jor
-El
returned to
Tieor
it didn’t deploy a dropship to take the two
Archons back to the surface, rather it headed straight towards the largest
warship the Varshoo had and launched a Nami at it. The powered missile shot
ahead of the Ma’kri and decelerated rapidly as it came up next to the target
vessel, which hadn’t bothered to move. It did have its shields raised, but they
did nothing to stop the IDF bubble from going up and snaring the warship in
place.

The other warships nearby did move when the Star Force
vessel came in close, not knowing of its strength, but clearly seeing that it
was larger than any of them. To counter it they moved a fleet in around the knife-like
ship and opened fire…with the
Jor
-El
simply
ignoring their pathetic attacks and moving up over top of the target warship
and the Nami holding it in place.

A few pinpoint mauler blasts brought the ship’s
shields down, followed by a few more that plucked away the ship’s upper weapon
batteries. Once those were down the Ma’kri extended its own shields around the
captured ship and sent a dropship equipped with breaching gear down to the
hull, where it cut and installed its own airlock in the Varshoo ship.

Through that breach point two sets of armor followed,
with it resealing behind Jenna and Levi and the dropship returning to the
Ma’kri. There was an assortment of Star Force troops onboard that they could
have used for this sort of assault, but the Archons had decided that the risks
for this operation were going to be theirs alone…which would allow them to be
as reckless as they liked without having to worry about protecting anyone else.

As the Varshoo ships were seeing, the Ma’kri was so
powerful that it didn’t even need to bother shooting back at their fleet and
simply absorbed all the damage they could dish out while Jenna and Levi fought
their way through the enemy ship with a combination of stun weapons and
psionics. The confined corridors were an advantage to them, given that the
Varshoo couldn’t mass any real weaponsfire against them, not to mention that
the Archons could see through the walls, doors, and around corners with their
Pefbar, giving them dominance in that fact alone, ignoring the rest of their
long list of advantages.