Star Force: Survivor (SF52) (3 page)

“Ok, time to play truck,” he said, daring to be
reckless and moving off again, this time towards the convoy route and floating
barely 10 meters off the ground. He couldn’t move very fast that low, for there
was a bit of elevation change that would have him bumping the ground, but he
aligned himself with the evacuation corridor and got in close to the mechs,
hoping they’d give him some air cover.

It wasn’t enough, and a pair of Skarron fighters
poured plasma into his topside shield, eventually breaching it with three
blasts before he got near the intact anti-air turrets in the city and they
killed one of them…which almost fell on top of his dropship. The other peeled
off, giving him a straight shot into the city.

He got a message indicating that the spaceport had
been taken,
then
revised landing coordinates from an
Archon that wanted him to put down on top of one of the lower buildings near
the city’s edge. Glad that someone had a plan he could execute,
Davi
flew to the small four-story building and landed on an
auxiliary pad…or rather hovered over it, for it wasn’t really a pad but a
parking spot for hover vehicles and too small for his dropship. He lowered the
main ramp and parked his dropship on the edge of the building so the ramp set
down on the pad while the rest of it hovered over the drop off.

This time he stayed in the cockpit to maintain the
precise altitude and keep the ramp steady. He got on the comm and communicated
to those ground troops in the building, instructing them of what he needed them
to do…then a few seconds later the first of the evacuees ran up onto the roof
and into his dropship.

Halfway through loading he got a comm from the Archon
indicating that they had gotten everyone onboard, but with a glance from
Davi
at his hold cams he saw that they had plenty of room
to spare. As he raised the ramp he asked if there was another location they
could pick up people at and he got a second waypoint…this one on the ground
just outside the city walls.

Davi
blew out a breath,
realizing how reckless this all was, but went for the second group anyway. He
flew over the city edge and set down, picking up a host of commandos that were
fighting a rear guard action. Before they were even all up the ramp he got the
signal to go and didn’t hesitate. He moved the dropship forward, triggering the
ramp closure, and took off towards the rear of the convoy that was now making
good speed away from the city…with no one else staying behind aside from a pair
of chewed up madcats covering for him, and they were now running in retreat as
well as the enemy infantry swarms were closing in around them and bathing their
armored hulks with tiny plasma blasts.

One of them got hammered by a nearby Type-4 walker,
but it didn’t go down and accelerated up into a sprint that threw off the
enemy’s targeting enough for it to break free…then it started peppering the sky
with anti-air fire as a quartet of fighters came in towards the dropship.

Knowing that he couldn’t just sit there and fly a
straight line,
Davi
pulled up and did a corkscrew to
starboard, hopefully putting the fighters between him and the nearest walker.
The part of the ship the enemy had been shooting suddenly disappeared from
sight as he flipped the ship upside down as he continued to accelerate ahead
and into a weave over the convoy as a few more mechs turned around and added to
the anti-air.

The underside shields on the dropship held up until a
lachar blast from a walker penetrated them and vaporized half the hull armor.
Davi
completed the corkscrew and dropped back down to the
surface, zipping over top the convoy vehicles and seeing two of the fighters go
down behind him. That left two more on his tail, which a lone skeet came up
from the ground and distracted, giving the dropship a few precious seconds to
accelerate ahead and get a gap on them.

That skeet blew apart and crashed nearby the convoy,
with one of the enemy fighters surviving and coming back at the dropship. It
was out of weapons range but closing distance again, with
Davi
squeezing every bit of acceleration out of the Falcon that he could…but seeing
that it wasn’t going to be enough.

He held out as long as he could, not going evasive and
wasting precious seconds of their lead, then the Skarron fighter caught up to
them and started hammering his aft shields.

“Shit,” he said, pulling up hard and angling into the
sky. The Skarron trailed them easily, continuing to pound the rear of the
dropship and broke through the shields just as
Davi
reached his apex and flipped the aerodynamic nose of the craft down to the
ground, with the flat top catching the atmosphere and braking it hard…forcing
the dropship back and almost into the fighter, which dodged evasively.

Then
Davi
used the one
advantage he had and pulled on the planet’s gravity well with his craft’s
binary drives, putting it into a descent so fast that the Skarron fighter
couldn’t match with gravity alone. At the end of the sudden fall he braked hard
and angled them back onto a course towards the nearest city pushing his ship
for all it was worth and getting abrasion warnings on the hull, given that it
didn’t have any shields left to cut the air with…for those had burnt off in the
rapid descent.

They reformed a few seconds later at low power and
created the needle nose shape that added to the craft’s aerodynamics, allowing
Davi
to regain a bit of a lead on the Skarron, but it fell
in behind him again, gaining rapidly.

Fortunately there were mechs ahead, further up the
long ground
convoy, that
signaled him to come to them.
He gladly did so, literally parking the dropship in with their convoy vehicles
and baiting the fighter in…with it subsequently blowing up and its shredded
hulk impacting like a meteor nearby.

“Thank you,” he commed them before heading back off
towards the destination city and accelerating to amicable speed with no further
pursuit.

“
Davi
, you can be so stupid
sometimes,” he berated himself.

“I’d call it badass flying,” the Archon said, coming
up behind him in the cockpit.

“And a lot of luck,” he added, still not accepting
that what he had done had been anything other than reckless. Fortunately it had
paid off.

The silver-clad Archon put an armored hand on his
shoulder. “Thank you.”

“Ditto.
I only move stuff
around, you’re the one killing the Skarrons.”

“And we have a lot more to kill,” she said, letting go
and sitting down in the empty copilot’s seat.

“Yes we do,”
Davi
agreed,
glancing at the battlemap full of enemy contacts.

3

January 11, 2549

Reesi
System

Metropolis

“Go, go,
go
!” Victor
Anassi
yelled over his comm to the rest of his squad as he
ran across a fairly firm section of ground. Skarron infantry was trailing them
but not very fast on their quadruped feet, nor were their Hobbit skirmishers,
meaning that if the commandos and other Knights kept moving they could stay
ahead of them. Sticking around to fight, however, would end up being a
bloodbath.

They’d just executed a fighting retreat out of the
partially constructed city of
Topalia
, which was now
being overrun by enemy infantry with light walker support. There were no mechs
or aerial units in the area, so they’d had to abandon their position. The
firepower the walkers threw down was just too much, and even with the building
cover there was no way to take them down. They could have stayed and tried to
find a way, but the enemy infantry had driven them out and now the defense team
was executing a running retreat to the northern sea a few kilometers away.

Victor kept up a steady pace, his longer strides
eating up the distance as the shorter commandos scurried alongside him. His
Knight shield had been so damaged and full of holes that he’d left it behind,
making his running considerably easier, though a few of the others still had
theirs and were lugging them over their backs as they moved. Altogether there
were about 500 Star Force troops fleeing across the ground and out onto a
peninsula, effectively boxing themselves in as the Skarrons swarmed over the
city and chased after them, cutting off all other land retreat options.

Victor didn’t like that, but they had few choices. Had
they gone laterally they would have had to run the gauntlet and most probably
wouldn’t have survived to get to the nearest forest…and even then they would
have had a very long hike to the next closest outpost. They’d been placed in
Topalia
to hold it, being backed up by a mech unit roaming
the area. That unit had been redeployed in an emergency relief effort to the
south two days ago that had not gone well. Stripped of their support the
Skarrons had eventually moved on them and forced their hasty retreat.

All across the continent Star Force cities were
falling, with the civilians now being evacuated prior to assaults as the
Skarron approach was becoming predictable. They were knocking off one city
after another and being none too subtle about it. Star Force was kicking the
crap out of their units but they were overwhelming them with numbers…the same
old story, it seemed. Very rarely had Victor fought a battle where they had the
numerical advantage. They were always trying to pull off the upset, and usually
did, but today wasn’t one of those days, nor this year, for the Skarrons were
getting close to owning the full continent.

There were still a number of cities that were intact,
but they were already undergoing evacuation with the writing on the wall being
clear. Star Force orders had set down that they weren’t going to hand anything
over to the Skarrons, hence Victor’s unit’s assignment here. Hold if you could,
but hurt the enemy regardless. That they’d done, in terms of infantry anyway,
but they simply didn’t have the ordinance to take down the walkers…nor the
Archons. He’d heard rumors of strikers and even some rangers taking them down
single handedly. He wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but he really wished
they had one of the higher ranking ones with them now.

All they had were two adepts, powerful enough in their
own right, but not a match for a walker by any stretch of the imagination.
They’d had a third, but she hadn’t made it out of the city, along with a few
others that had got caught in an ambush by the Skarron elites. They’d engaged
the Archon while sending in a flanking wave of Hobbits. The Archon had mowed
down the smaller infantry, as expected, but the larger plasma weapons on the
elites wore her down to the point that when she finally broke free and
retreated another group of waiting Hobbits got the drop on her.

Victor had gotten to her and pulled her out of the
fire, but she didn’t last more than five minutes. They had to leave her body
there, for they couldn’t carry anything with them on retreat, save for the
three injured commandos. Victor had offered to take one of them, but the
remaining Archons wanted him in the rear being unkind to anyone that might
catch up to them, leaving him trailing behind the others slightly with a constant
eye on his battlemap and peripherals.

The three commandos ahead of him, one of which had a
plasma gash on his left hip that had melted through the armor and left a
visible burn mark on his skin, splashed through a small creek slowing their
process momentarily. Victor jumped and made it across with only one foot
hitting water, but it sank in some four inches, nearly tripping him up as he
ran on but the light muck was nothing his superior musculature couldn’t handle.

When he caught up to the backs of the commandos he
turned sharp right, running perpendicular to their direction and allowing
himself to look behind them, as he’d been doing for the past 2 kilometers. No
one was close, but he could see glints of Skarron armor in the distance as the
sunlight reflected off their shiny plates. There were tufts of trees and
grasses, making the visual inspection dicey and leaving plenty of opportunity
for ambush. He wished they’d had at least a probe in the air for a visual, let
alone a fighter or warship that he could pull telemetry from, but at the moment
all he had was his eyes and ears to work with.

Victor turned back on course and slowly made up the
distance, catching up to the others then pulling a juke to the left in a
similar manner. They were staying ahead of their pursuit, but before long
they’d run into the water’s edge and could go no further. They were supposed to
receive evac there, but if it didn’t come they’d be in for a tough battle. So
far none of the Skarron walkers had left the city, meaning they’d only have
infantry to deal with for a while…which was a fight Victor was more than
willing to make.

He was still fuming over the lost Archon and commandos
and really wanted something to smash.

About 20 minutes later he got his chance as the
soldiers bunched up on the water’s edge, their ride now there yet and the enemy
slowly catching up. Victor moved out into a small depression, keeping his head
high enough to see through the grasses while relying on a spotter further back
to keep an eye on enemy positions. He waited there until he got a battlemap
ping then took off, springing up and running straight towards an armored
Skarron and jumping up onto its back.

It tried to move aside, but Victor was too quick and
got up on top…their weak spot. He pulled its two front arms in, which were
jutting up from the sides of its flat back, throwing off their aim as it tried
to shoot the commandos following Victor out. He held them, weapons up, as the
back two tried to knock him off, delaying it long enough for the commandos to
pour plasma into its ‘face’ and break through the armor there. A lot of
wrestling later and it dropped to the ground, with Victor taking a plasma hit
to the left arm as a nearby Hobbit took aim at him.

The Knight jumped off and ran towards the stubby
creature, pulling his sword off its armor latch and whipping it around so fast
he nearly took the thing’s head off with it. It rolled to the ground, stunned
and possibly with a broken neck, and Victor paid no more attention to it as
he
 
moved to the four more nearby and
physically beat them down. His sword and one backup pistol were all he had left
in the way of ammunition, but his body was also a weapon and he was going to
save his last few plasma shots for later when he expected to need them the
most.

More and more plasma began to fly through the air as
the Skarron troops closed in and both sides went at it. A few minutes of hard
fighting and several commandos went down. Victor didn’t know if they were dead
or not, but he couldn’t worry about that. There were enemies all around and
that meant just one thing…if he couldn’t run, he was going to take as many down
as he could.

With his physical shield left behind and his armor’s
shields flickering on and off he began to take damage, but that didn’t slow him
down one bit. Pulling on decades of experience and training he moved from point
to point as fast as the two Archons and punched, kicked, and whacked Hobbits
down like they were nothing more than children throwing rocks at him.

When he was about to get to another Skarron, this one
unarmored and leading a group of some 50 Hobbits, a loud screech belted out
from behind him. To his credit Victor didn’t look back, taking the distraction
as an advantage and getting several more Hobbits as they stared up the water
behind the Humans as a giant walker rose up from the depths emitting the
electronic battle cry.

As the water fell off it two thick forward arms on the
crab-like
Weapon
-class aquatic ‘mech’
opened up with mauler blasts, showering the infantry beyond the Star Force
troops with not a single glob of energy but a shower of smaller globules
spewing out like a showerhead. They mowed down the hobbits and penetrated the
armor on the Skarron elites while kicking up a huge plume of vaporized water
and ground, creating a visible wall separating the friendly troops from most of
their attackers.

Switching his HUD over to augmented view Victor dove
into the edge of that cloud and took down the nearest Skarron as the rain
continued to fall 100 meters out. He knew better than to go out there, but also
knew that the gunners would be watching the battlemap closely and
see
his ID tag. He felt safe to venture out a bit and take
advantage of the visual mess, which he hoped the enemy wouldn’t be able to see
through.

He spent four shots from his plasma pistol and took
the unarmored Skarron down quickly, then used his sword to plow through a group
of more than 20 Hobbits before finally getting a retreat ping on his battlemap.
Victor took down two more then turned and ran, coming back out of the cloud and
heading towards the spot where the beacon was located, visible on his HUD as an
overlay marking a position near the shore.

Victor sprinted up over a small rise and saw another
craft coming up out of the water as the Weapon moved up fully onto shore,
walking with its eight pointy legs and waving its four upper tentacles around
like a goad to the enemy as it continued firing with its stubby arms. The
aquatic mech was designed for underwater combat, but with shoreline
applications in mind as well…and right now the ugly thing was a welcome
sight…as was the hatch opening up on the transport that had just the upper
section of its hull above water and a long bridge reaching out to get all the
way to shore.

With the Weapon providing cover fire, and hopefully
killing a lot more enemy infantry in the process, the commandos sprinted across
the five meter wide bridge and poured down inside the aquatics craft, with
Victor and the two surviving Archons running around the battlefield to pick up
the wounded, which appeared as special icons on the battlemap. Victor got one
of them and slung him over his shoulder, then picked up another and brought
both of them to the foot of the bridge, dropping them off for others to carry
in while he went back for more.

He did that three times,
then
moved around the battlefield looking for more despite there being no more ID
tags. From experience he knew that armor could be damaged and not
transmit
their location, so he made a visual scan and ran
around the area…and it was a good thing he did, for he saw a dull white suit
crawling across the ground with its helmet off and a large blood splotch on the
side of his blonde head.

Victor ran over to him and, without a word or gesture,
picked up the commando and ran him back over to the bridge as the Archons made
similar sweeps to look for others. Three steps before he hit the bridge he got
a ‘finished’ ping so he took the man all the way in, running across the firm,
rail-less walkway all the way to the top of the transport that was barely two
meters above the water line and fairly far out into the water. He felt very
exposed running out there, but as soon as he ducked down inside he knew they
were safe.

There were several medics in the much larger
compartment below, so he set the wounded commando down and let them attend to
him as he stepped back up enough to look out as the Archons finally came back.
He let them pass him by,
then
he ducked down as the
hatch sealed over and the bridge retracted.

The transport eventually sank back into the water, but
the Weapon did not. Instead it walked further up onto land and laid into the
infantry at range as far as its maulers would reach. It worked them over good,
killing as many that were stupid enough to stick around, then when it had no more
within reach walked backwards and disappeared into the water like some monster
of legend, with the ripples of its passing eventually dissipating and making
the calm water a question mark of what other terrible things lay beneath.

Victor and the others rode the transport for several
hours until it docked with an underwater city and they got off into familiar
surroundings. With no immediate reassignment the troops were given temporary
quarters and Victor was shown to his. He went inside and began stripping off
his damaged armor, inspecting each piece and judging whether or not a simple
patch job would suffice or whether he’d need a full replacement for the piece.

His chest plate was going to have to go, for it had
taken the most damage and was nearly penetrated in three separate spots. His
back showed no damage whatsoever…which was typical Knight. They always fought
facing forward and did very little running away, though in large skirmishes
they often dove into the middle and had enemies all around them. Today hadn’t
been one of those days, so his back piece was salvageable.