Star Force: Survivor (SF52)

1

October 2, 2548

Reesi
System (Beta
Region)

Metropolis

Rio Jakson walked in full battle gear along with a
large group of his fellow commandos onto the
Armadillo
-class transport that was currently docked with their
jumpship. The transport was so large it couldn’t fit inside one of the hangar
bays at nearly a mile long, so it was nestled up inside the docking hollow that
allowed the jumpship to carry other vessels within it. This transport hadn’t
arrived in the system, but was meeting up with the cargo jumpship to transfer
the troops onboard. There were some 58,000 commandos and Knights from the 18th
army onboard with him, but only a third of that was going down in the
armadillo…and they were being packed in tightly.

Rio walked across the docking umbilical casually,
along with many other battle-hardened vets. He was still young by commando
standards, but his newb days were long behind him. Now at 107 years old he’d
spent 9 decades training and fighting, with what eagerness he’d previously had now
lost…replaced by a steely calm that knew when the time to act came he’d be
ready. His body and mind no longer wasted energy in
worry,
for he knew the naval division would get them to ground safely. Then it would
be time to fight, but not now.

Wearing the dull grey/white armor that commandos were
infamous for, Rio carried a small pack on his back, over top of which was his
weapon rack, full of rifles and pistols, all but one of which were plasma. The
sole exception was a stun pistol, just in case the need arose…and those
situations happened, he knew, but they weren’t being shipped here to play nice.
Metropolis sat in a system kissing up against Dvapp territory and was one of
two Star Force systems that had been hit by the Skarron ‘second wave’ as it’d
come to be called by the Regulars. The other had hit Rotunna, which was
practically asking to get your ass kicked.

Archon Randy was there, safeguarding that system and
its multiple planets, while
Reesi
had only Metropolis.
It was a much smaller colony system, but well developed none the less. There
were some 1.2 billion Humans and Kiritas living on Metropolis, which at the
moment was surrounded by a Skarron blockade in middle orbit. Low orbit still
remained Star Force territory, with now 4 Sentinels patrolling in lazy circles
and the navy taking shelter in their destructive auras, baiting the Skarrons in
but the numerically superior enemy was having none of it.

All across the ADZ Beta Region border the Skarrons
were blockading their chosen targets and not touching a single Sentinel. Any
ships trying to get in and out from the planets had to run the blockade, which
was doable, but tricky…and the Skarrons were getting good at making intercept
runs, despite their inferior gravity drives. They’d had 2 years to practice in
some cases, with the assault on Metropolis being only 7 months old and the
newest addition to the 14 other worlds that were currently under the enemy’s
naval squeeze.

When Rio got to the other side of the docking
umbilical the commandos were led via guiding holograms to their waiting area in
the transport, with him and several other members of his Phalanx being seated
in what looked like banks of theatre seats facing opposite each other with a
walkway separating the two. Above that walkway
were
holographic display screens, updating the troops on the ongoing battles and
offering other intel that would be valuable…but it was mostly a way to keep
them preoccupied during the long wait.

Rio sat down on one of the bench-like seats…for his
equipment rack wouldn’t have fit with a backed chair and the armadillo had been
built specifically as a troop transport. Nearly identical commandos sat down on
his left and right, with the row behind him already filled and the one in front
to soon follow. They all had custom fit armor, with a few inches in height
differential and body thickness to tell them apart, but for the casual eye they
all looked the same. Rio’s helmet HUD gave him the ID tags of everyone around
him when he looked at them, emblazoned in little icons above each person’s
helmet.

That mode he could toggle on and off, but with so many
people around he wanted to know who was who. His Phalanx was his operational
unit, and he knew every one of the 991 commandos in it…along with the 25
Knights assigned to pair with them. Normally there would have been 1000, but
they’d taken some losses in their previous campaign and had yet to be sent
replacements…if there were any to be had.

Rio was immensely glad that Star Force had had the
wisdom to keep him out of the war zone for as long as they did while he got the
training he needed…which now looked a lot less thorough from his experienced
point of view. And the only reason he’d been sent out when he did was because
of the special circumstances and Clan Metal Gear’s individual approach to
assignments. After 43 years in the Clan’s service he had been transferred to a
Mainline
army unit…not a colonial one or other
relief/training units, but a frontline army.

The 18th had 1.2 million commandos in total, augmented
by Knights, Aerial, Mechs, and Aquatics that put their full roster at 2
million+. His Phalanx existed within a Brigade of 10,000 and a Regiment of
200,000…with his Phalanx identification being 18th Blue Epsilon 4. The 4s and
7s were being dispatched to Metropolis in a fleet of cargo jumpships that were
also carrying badly needed supplies along with a new Sentinel, broken down into
pieces that was even now beginning to run the blockade to get down to low orbit
where it would be assembled and add to the planet’s orbital defenses.

The Skarrons weren’t taking well to that and a major
battle was forming along the entry corridor as the navy was screening for the
first piece. They’d entered on a seldom used jumpline because the Skarrons had
all the main ones guarded. Thanks to the binary drives Star Force could come in
anywhere they wanted, but it was the speed of approach that varied. The main
jumplines could deposit ships close in or far out from a planet in the blink of
an eye, but use a rogue line and your approach had to be much slower…while
expending the same engine output, for you didn’t have a direct line to the
gravity wells to push/pull off of.

That slower approach had given the Skarrons a little
bit of a heads up they were coming, but not much. As it was they were
scrambling to get more ships into position to engage the screening drone fleet,
but as Rio watched he could already tell they weren’t going to make it.
Warships on both sides were getting slagged in the fighting, but the jump
cradle carrying the first piece of the Sentinel was getting through and soon
would be within the firing range of one of the complete ones…and Rio doubted
the Skarrons would dare to go there. For the past 2 years they hadn’t gone
within firing range on a Sentinel
anywhere
,
meaning that if this piece got through to that radius then it was probably
going to be safe.

There were still three more sections to get in, and
Rio guessed they’d be coming in along different jumplines. A notice indicated
that the armadillo would be going to ground concurrent with the third section
and using the blocking naval fleet to cover for it simultaneously. Rio had
expected to go down somewhere else while the Sentinel sections made for a
distraction, but apparently not. He waited patiently as the armadillo finished
loading, then watched on some of the
holos
as it
detached from the jumpship and began maneuvering away, ready to make its own
microjump.

Currently they were sitting in high orbit around a
nearby planet, with the data feeding into the
holos
being delayed by lag but otherwise ‘live.’ The armadillo moved down into a
lower orbit and aligned on a jumpline to nowhere, launching off the planet’s
gravity well with just a kiss of momentum. It traveled out into null space
between the planet and the star, then yanked hard on both distant gravity wells
in order to slow them to a stop at the rendezvous point where the Sentinel
section and its escort fleet already waited, with the escorts being mostly the
same ones that had just been fighting to screen for the first piece.

The escorts taking the second piece in were already
currently engaged while this fleet finished assembly. When they were ready and
aligned the armadillo pumped up its gravity drives nearly as high as they could
go and pushed off using multiple gravity wells, all of which only gave them a
small response. The jump cradle had no trouble, given it was capable of
traveling between stars and had huge gravity drives. The armadillo was another
story, designed as an insystem transport, and had to boost its output extremely
high in order to keep up.

When they came out of the microjump at Metropolis the
deceleration was a piece of cake, but a group of Skarron ships was nearby and
redirected to intercept them immediately. The jumplines down to the Sentinels
were constantly obscured, despite the orbital rotations, by the enemy fleet to
keep Star Force from jumping incoming ships directly to them else risk a
collision. That meant the armadillo and others had to come down beside it,
outside of weapons range, then scurry over to get within its protective
umbrella or head down to the surface.

The Sentinel piece went laterally along with most of
the escort fleet while a few drones followed several armadillos down to the
atmosphere until they were sure the Skarrons weren’t going to cause them
trouble. Only a few ships actually tried, for most were desperately trying to
break through the escort fleet around the Sentinel piece…making the choice of
coming down with the massive payload obviously correct. Rio had expected a
diversion, he just didn’t think it would occur in the same place.

Still watching the
holos
and
feeling only a little trickle of adrenaline starting to creep its way into his
system, Rio and the other commandos talked little, merely waiting patiently as
the armadillos split up heading to different locations on the planet and
picking up aerial escorts waiting for them. While the Skarrons weren’t engaging
the Sentinels, there was way too much orbital space for the defense platforms
to block, with the enemy having run ships down to the surface whenever they
could get past Star Force’s low orbit fleet…which wasn’t overly hard given the
number of warships they had in orbit to screen with.

Star Force almost always made them pay for it, but
they’d succeeded in getting troops to several LZs and were pressing the war to
conquer the planet from a ground perspective rather than naval. Rio appreciated
that, for it was usually the reverse. The fate of Metropolis and the other 14
systems under assault would be determined by his field of specialty, and both
he and the others were more than ready to fight that kind of war.

Recently his Phalanx had been engaging the lizards on
multiple worlds with most of those engagements being cleanup efforts when the
enemy was outnumbered but still needed killing. They were hard fights…they
always were when you went up against the lizards, but the outcome was never in
question. The losses they’d suffered were more like freak accidents, with Dan
having been killed by an errant tank blast that was never meant for him. A mech
had hit the tank just as it was firing, twisting the shot and landing a swath
of plasma on his shieldless armor as he took cover behind a Knight’s shield as
his emitters reset.

He’d been doing everything right and been caught by
the lateral blast. The Knight survived, but Dan had his armor melt right off
him in several spots, with what plasma was left getting through and carving
several deep gashes into his body that he didn’t survive. Rio hated losing him
and how it had happened, but life was messy and sometimes the statistically
impossible scenario played itself out. Had his shields even been deployed at
10% he would have survived, but he’d been caught by a tank blast in the maybe
15 seconds needed to get a matrix back up at minimal power.

That was just plain bad luck…and it had ended the life
of a good commando that had been training and fighting for more than 150 years.
That felt like such a waste to Rio, to die like that, but he couldn’t find
fault in anyone that day. It had just happened, like getting sucker punched in
the gut and losing your breath. The only thing you can do from that point on is
recover and keep moving forward, which is what he and the others had done.

They didn’t like losses, at all, but if there wasn’t a
mistake made that they could correct then there literally wasn’t anything to be
done, so Rio had put Dan out of mind and same for the other 8 losses in recent
years. He didn’t know when they’d get replacements, for sufficiently
experienced commandos were in high demand nowadays, but they didn’t really need
them. 991 or 1000 made no difference to Rio. They’d get the job done
regardless, and he almost preferred going 9 short rather than getting sent
newbs that didn’t belong here.

He credited Star Force for that too, given that none
had shown up and they were simply floating the reduced Phalanx.

Halfway through their atmospheric flight orders
started popping up on the
holos
and then in Rio’s
helmet, indicating that they were going to come down very near a combat zone instead
of the preplanned LZ. That got a spike of adrenaline flowing, and Rio clenched
and unclenched his leg, back, and arm muscles, loosening him up a bit from what
he knew could be a sluggish body after such a long time sitting.

Around him the others did the same, for they’d been
through this before and knew how to prep.

He got a comm prompt in his helmet and activated it
with an eye blink.