Star Force: Survivor (SF52) (6 page)

“Stay or run?”

“Depends on how many trees,”
Iden
said, continuing to push and getting significant resistance from the door.

“I think I can slide through,” one of the other
commandos said, standing next to them.

“Try,” the Archon insisted, still applying pressure.

The slightly shorter commando passed by Rio and went
through feet first. He got caught at the waist but managed to wiggle his way
through, then a moment after he was out of view they all got a battlemap update
as his armor began to map out the surrounding area with low level sensor pings.
He also sent them a visual as he scanned the area, catching sight of the
Skarron fighter making a looping turn to come back for another pass.

“Back or go,”
Iden
told him
on the comm, with the commando taking off into the woods.

“Allow me,” the Knight said, stepping in between Rio
and
Iden
, inserting a leg into the gap then pushing
off with his other and shoulder to form a bigger wedge that moved the stubborn
panel further out on its hinge and enough to easily get the other commandos
through.

A waypoint flashed on Rio’s HUD and he dove through
the gap as the explosions peppered the upper hull and dissipated. Behind him a
cherry red spot appeared and disappeared on the port side…which
was now the roof
given how the dropship lay. Knowing that
wouldn’t hold long,
Iden
ducked out after three of
the commandos went through and got
himself
into open
air.

He looked around at the trees…tall, thick, crooked,
and not much in the way of leaves but there were enough branches to take some
of the plasma.

“Perimeter at 100 meters,” he ordered. “I need a
hideaway for the wounded.”

As he said that he moved around and got a view on the
Skarron fighter, wondering why it wasn’t just hovering over top and blasting
into them. Almost as soon as he made the thought the thing decelerated at range
and began creeping up on them…with him knowing that was exactly what it
intended to do next.

He opened a comm to the Knight. “I’m going for the
fighter. I think I can at least slow it down with my psionics if I get close.
Get everyone out and moving. I’ll catch up if and when I can. Don’t wait on
me.”

“Understood,” Victor said, keying his own comm and
coordinating with the commandos still inside the dropship to get everyone out
ASAP. As he did he saw the silver armor run off through the trees in the direction
the fighter was coming from, then eventually disappear as too many trunks and
branches got in the way of his vision.

He could still read him on battlemap, but he trusted
the Archon knew what he was doing…and as he said, would buy them a little time.

Victor came back under the opening where the ramp was
wedged against several trees and helped to pull out a very bloody woman and two
men, Chad included, and sent them along the line of unarmored people heading
off through the trees following a pair of commandos he’d just assigned to the
task. He poked his head back in for one last look, then seeing nothing but the
2 corpses he mentally abandoned the dropship and followed the perimeter
commandos out as they collapsed around the vulnerable personal in a flanking
escort, leaving the dropship and the Archon behind.

Everyone was running as best they could, but it was
much slower than Victor was capable of so he took a few moments to look back,
finally getting a good view of the damage to the dropship,
who’s
front section looked to be completely missing. He was surprised the pilot had
survived at all…then he suddenly saw and heard the Skarron fighter dip down
from the sky and into the trees, breaking through several of them before
pulling up and racing back into the sky.

Their momentary diversion a success, Victor did as
ordered and left the Archon behind, goosing his charges along as quickly as he
thought they were capable of moving.

6

January 21, 2549

Reesi
System

Metropolis

“What have we got?” Nevi asked
,
leaning against the trunk of an ugly tree as Rio took a look ahead from several
branches above him.

“Trouble,” the other commando answered, using his
helmet’s magnification to scout out the plain ahead. They’d been traveling for
more than a day and had lost six people to Skarron fighters strafing them, but
eventually they’d either eluded them or the Skarrons had bigger things to
shoot, for they hadn’t seen any for the past 11 hours. It was just coming up on
the night cycle, with a little daylight left in the very long rotation that the
planet had, but ahead of them the forest ended and a grassy, muddy plain
lay…which would leave them exposed out in the open with nothing to hide from
the enemy in.

“Fighters?”
Nevi asked.

“No,” Rio said, shaking his head in dismay. “There’s a
grounded transport several
klicks
to the southwest
and it’s got a good flood of infantry around it.”

“What they hell are they doing all the way out here?
Wait, are they setting up a new LZ?”

“I doubt it. It’s just a single transport and there
are no walkers. I’m pretty sure they’re here to hunt us. There are no other
Star Force signals in the area.”

“Shit…why are they going to so much trouble?”

“I guess they don’t like us very much,” Rio commented,
searching the limited view he had. There were several branches up and around
him, for he didn’t want to climb high enough to make
himself
visible and give away their position. The survivors had hunkered down for a few
hours of rest a ways back, with Rio and Nevi scouting out the area ahead while
some of the other commandos who weren’t tired did likewise in other directions.

But they had to go across that plain to get to their
destination, which was a small Star Force city still some 50+ kilometers away.
They’d tried to get a signal out to alert the others to their position, but in
order to do so they had to use the ‘open’ method of communication. Upgrades to
the armor had included a transmitter capable of reaching orbit, but the signal
wouldn’t be stealthed like their normal battlemap transmissions. Those signals
had a much shorter range, and when they’d reported in their position they’d
immediately drawn an enemy fighter response…basically waving their hands and
saying ‘come shoot me.’

They’d lost two people to that, and weren’t about to
do so again. Fortunately they’d gotten a response from an orbital relay that
was one-way, informing them of the current status of the surrounding units and
cities, so they knew the one they were headed toward was still intact, but the
area they were located in was deemed ‘hazardous’ and there was no way an
extraction team could get to them at the moment. Normally that wasn’t something
that Star Force ever said, but with the level of Skarron units deployed Rio
didn’t doubt it was the truth.

Their only chance was to stay off the radar, and
Victor, the lone Knight in the group, had assumed command in the Archon’s
absence and ordered no further comm attempts. The battlemap transmissions
continued, along with a reduced local comm range, helmet to helmet, but nothing
that would go more than a few miles and potentially alert the enemy to their
location.

But they
had
to go across the plain, or else
stay put and try
to
wait the enemy out with the limited emergency supplies they had. Fortunately
one case had ambrosia doses, so Rio wasn’t feeling that loss just yet, but they
didn’t have a lot of time to burn and still had a good day’s run ahead of
them…with a lot of people who couldn’t run, meaning they were several days away
from getting to their destination.

Part of him almost wanted to try and hijack the
Skarron transport, but the hundreds of Hobbits spilling out around it squelched
that idea immediately. He could spot a few elites as well with their shiny
armor reflecting the last of the daylight. Night would help, but not as much as
you’d think, given that the Hobbits could see well in the dark.

That meant they were stuck, and Rio wasn’t sure what
they were going to do. He made a recording of the transport and panned his head
around to get a good view of the area, then climbed down the tree and headed
back into camp with Nevi, where he shared his visuals and sentiments with
Victor and the others.

“They can’t be here for us. That’s way too much
effort,” the Knight immediately said, not liking their luck. “There must be some
other objective in play.”

“Well we can’t get through there either way,” Nevi
added.

“No, we can’t,” Victor agreed. “And we can’t stay put.
We’ll have to head north and get more distance between us and them before we
try to cross.”

“That’s at least a 3 kilometer gap to cross,” Rio
pointed out. “The
civies
will be sitting ducks.”

“Not just them,”
Dravis
added from the second row of what had becoming a growing circle of troops
mingling together to discuss the matter. “I can run, but without armor I can’t
take any hits either.”

“It’s the running part that worries me,” Rio answered
him. “We have to make the crossing as quickly as possible and hope that their
air cover doesn’t find us. And even if we get across I bet someone will notice
and send those troops after us. We’ll be running for our lives and not everyone
can keep up.”

“Perhaps one of you should go on ahead and try to
bring back help,”
Davi
said, being one of the slower
ones and very out of his element without a ship to pilot, having to rely on his
secondary training and overall fitness to sustain him.

“They’ve got no help to send,” Victor reminded him.
“If there was it would already be on its way. Based on their last transmission
the city we’re heading towards might not stay in Star Force hands for long.
They’re already beginning to evacuate the civilians, so they expect to get hit.
This transport may be the first part of that assault. Even if it’s not, we
can’t wait and miss our opportunity…otherwise our trek gets impossibly longer
and our supplies are not increasing. We have to cross the gap and soon. The
question is where.”

“We can’t risk the unarmored personnel,” another
commando, one of the eldest in the group, said with finality. “We need a test
to see how the Skarrons will respond.
A two or three man team
crossing at speed.
If they make it across undetected then we can plan
out how to get the slow ones across. If they don’t, at least they can run and
gun.”

Victor nodded. “I agree, save for that we might be
squandering our only attempt at surprise.”

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Rio added. “There
are too many unknowns. We can’t run people out there without armor without some
certainty. All our options are bad, but a little test seems to be the best bet.
I’ll volunteer.”

“No, I will,” the other commando said. “And I’ll take
Greg and Christi. We’re the fastest here, so if we do get spotted we’ll have
the best chance. More than 3 will be a greater detection risk, and if we have
to fight I don’t want to go with less than that.”

“It’s risky either way,” Victor
said,
uncertainty in his voice. “If you want to try, then you’d best do it now and
hope darkness offers you some cover.”

“We’ll need a spotter on the edge to monitor,” he
said, glancing at Rio.

“Done.”

“Then let’s get moving,” he said, tapping two others
via battlemap ping. Rio saw them fall out with him and jog off into the woods.
He hesitated a moment, nodded at the Knight, then trailed behind the three all
the way to the forest edge several kilometers away where they held up,
hunkering down behind the thickest trees and looking out through the thin ones
on the edge.

“If we make it we’ll have to stay silent,” the elder
commando said to Rio, “but we’ll be watching this area if possible.”

On Rio’s battlemap a section of forest a kilometer and
a half long was highlighted on the far side.

“If you come under fire we’ll be
skirmishing
that area. Expect us there even if you don’t hear from us.”

“That could be enemy central,” Rio pointed out, given
that the transport was only a few kilometers to the south.

“All the more reason to have
friendlies there when the slowpokes come across.”

“I don’t like this, but I like sitting and waiting
even less,” Rio said candidly. “Good luck.”

The elder commando fist bumped him then nodded…with
the trio silently taking off through the trees and running out into the
grasses, half disappearing from view even with Rio’s nightvision activated.

Knowing he needed a better vantage point, he
backtracked a few meters and started climbing a tree that he thought would go
high enough. Once he got halfway up he realized he was wrong and had to
transfer from one to the other via walking out on a branch and hopping over to
an adjacent one, then climbing a bit higher in it.

When he finally got a semi-clear view he could see the
battlemap signal trackers from the trio making their way across the muddy
terrain at fairly high speed, all running single file with a few meters of gap
in between each of them. He glanced in the direction of the Skarrons,
then
searched what he could of the dark skies, looking for
fighters but seeing no activity in either.

His gaze was drawn back to the three commandos,
tearing across the terrain and sticking to what looked to be a combination of
drier and lower regions…which was difficult to find, given that there were many
puddles out there. Running cross country was something that commandos had a lot
of training experience in, and even though this was an entirely new planet, mud
was still mud.

Rio zoomed in with his helmet and watched the tiny
silhouettes move out towards a kilometer, where he began to lose sight of them.
The grasses were hiding their legs, with only their upper torsos and helmets
visible…and those were bouncing about, coming in and out of view as they ran
through trenches and up crests where they couldn’t avoid going elsewhere. Their
tracking IDs were
still marking their position, and
given the clean line of sight he expected those to hold up most of the way
across.

Rio found he was unconsciously holding his breath and
forced himself to blow out and resume a normal rhythm. So far so good, but he
still had a sinking feeling in his gut as they made it to the halfway
point…then a bit of motion to his left made that feeling collapse into complete
dread as a Skarron fighter zipped in and flashed past, firing plasma down on
the trio.

They immediately split up, all heading in the same
direction as the fighter looped around then came in slow and started bathing
the area around one of them in plasma. Rio couldn’t see much more than a
dot,
and the flashes of plasma were trying to overload his
nightvision. Eventually the tracking beacon for that commando winked out, with
the fighter moving up a bit and chasing the next one.

Rio watched in horror as that one,
then
finally the third disappeared from his battlemap. The enemy fighter hovered in
place, looking around for more soldiers. Finding none, it started to
backtrack
their route with it headed directly for Rio.

He jumped/fell out of the tree, hitting hard enough to
drive his boots halfway into the soft ground on landing. Pulling them out he
took off running back into the thicker forest and found a place a few hundred
meters in to hunker down, backing up into a small hollow were an exposed root
made a bit of an overhang that had dirt piled up on one side.

Rio waited there, hearing the faint whisper of the
fighter’s gravity drive as it passed nearby without stopping. He froze in place
for nearly five minutes afterwards before even thinking about moving, then
gingerly pulled himself up into a standing position and looked around,
listening intently.

Finding nothing he moved off, headed back to the main
group to report on the three dead and there being no way in hell they could
cross here.

With no other choice but to move further north, the
group spent the next day trying to get further away from the Skarrons, limited
in their movements by the civilians and wounded. They moved up another 11
kilometers before Rio volunteered for a single scouting mission…one with
spotters deployed high up in the trees so they could scan the skies for
fighters.

He went in the daylight and didn’t run, but rather
jogged from point to point, taking breaks and hunkering down playing an
imaginary game of
Frogger
with enemies that he hoped
were not watching. The gap that he was attempting to move across was more than
5 kilometers wide…hardly a choke point, but that was also by design. If the
Skarrons expected them to cross they’d be watching those and not the larger
areas, or so he hoped.

When Rio made it halfway across he took a long break,
looking around and just happy to be alive. He chanced using his comm on a
slightly longer range and had a brief conversation with the commando on the
forest’s edge as he sank himself halfway down into a tiny pond, with the water
coming up to his chest as his feet got sucked into the muck below.

There he waited for another 10 minutes, seeing if
anything was coming in after him delayed. When it appeared there wasn’t another
commando retraced his path…exactly. Rio had recorded his movements, putting
waypoints on the battlemap everywhere he had stopped and with his movements
being plotted. On the other commando’s HUD there was a holographic marker that
let him see exactly how Rio had moved and he followed it step for step all the
way out to him…then sunk into the water beside Rio.