Star Force: Revulsion (SF70) (7 page)

That wasn’t true, for
he’d had no idea this system contained Protovic, but given the lack of
translation he wasn’t going to bother trying to explain that bit of detail,
especially when it seemed that this one was slipping into the role of ally
almost automatically. That was a big step, especially if his kin would reciprocate,
but without a reliable means to communicate with the natives any combat
coordination was going to be limited going forward and Mike knew he couldn’t
just let the lizards have oodles of time to reposition and prepare for the
beatdown that was coming their way. If he made a misstep they’d make him pay
for it, and their victory here was not a sure thing…though he knew if he
handled it correctly the lizards wouldn’t be able to stop them.

How many Protovic they
killed before then was another matter, for there were still ground campaigns
ongoing. Mike didn’t like the idea of setting down troops without the ability
to talk to the Protovic, for the chances of misunderstandings or paranoia were
high and he wouldn’t stand for a single soldier of his to be killed because of
it.

He also wasn’t going to
let the lizards have time to kill Protovic while he twiddled his thumbs in
space either, so he had to come up with something.

After several hours of
tedious telepathic chats with his new friend whom he’d dubbed ‘Candy Cane’ he
let the man return to the rest of his crew that were going to remain on the
jumpships until they healed. He ordered the Admiral to give the man
comm
access so he could try and talk to his own people, that
was, if they could receive and decipher the Star Force transmissions. If their
computers talked in a totally alien language as well then that was going to be
a no go, but they had to try regardless.

Meanwhile Mike caught a
quick nap for a couple of hours then took a short run and headed back to the
command nexus to begin working on his next move…and seeing what the lizards and
Protovic were going to make theirs.

7

March 3, 2826

Aphat
System

Jmry

Mike sat hunched over
inside the cockpit of his skeet, his Archon armor sliding into grooves in the
seat designed to match it perfectly and give him a relaxed pose even while
leaning forward and essentially resting his chest on the angled padding. His
hands and feet were leveraging manual controls while his mind was partially
linked into the neural interface and giving him the sensor feeds directly
rather than relying on the holograms surrounding him. His eyes were closed to
slits with him barely seeing the images around him through his own visual
senses, though he was very aware of his body as he feathered the controls and
eased his aerial fighter down beneath the ridges outlining a valley where a
Protovic outpost was under siege.

In the days that
followed the first orbital battle there had been no progress on finding a
common language, or even roots of one, but an agreement had been reached on
landing troops to fight the lizards on one of the 4 held planets with advancing
lizard incursions on them. It was more of a point and nod ‘yes’ exercise than
an actual agreement, but the Protovic knew Star Force was coming down to aid
them in the fighting and that was pretty much all they had to go on.

Leaving the Admiral in
command of the fleet after considerably thinning the lizards’ system ship count,
Mike had come down with the ground troops and helped rout an invasion of a
city. Trouble was, Protovic cities weren’t self-contained. This one had
buildings sprawling across a wide area in splotches without a defined perimeter.
Some lizard troops had gotten into sections and dug in, but Mike and the Bsidd
had kept most of their troops blocked from ever getting that far, then he had
gone in and helped locate and eliminate the interlopers less than an hour ago.

Once finished there
he’d ordered his troops out to other locations and hopped in a skeet enroute to
another front. This section of
Jmry
was falling apart
under the lizard assault and he didn’t have time to waste transitioning from
one to another. He was tired, but sitting in a cockpit wasn’t going to stress
him much, prompting him to put off a sleep cycle until he’d helped his troops
keep this military outpost from falling to the lizards.

Columns of infantry and
mechs were making their way up the valley, already having cut off the lizards’
reinforcement lane here and attacking them from behind, but as was typical the
enemy had multiple fronts and had encircled the Protovic in this very
treacherous circuit of canyons with an uncertain amount of troops in play. Mike
expected them to have been dug in by now, with him flying on ahead to scout the
area.

His Pefbar did him no
good at this altitude so he had to rely on the skeet’s sensors entirely to
search with, but his gut told him there was trouble here and that he was flying
into hazardous terrain. That proved true about a third of the way up to the
Protovic bunker as a burst of anti-air fire came from a nook in the canyon. A
few splinters of plasma hit his shields before he was able to roll out of it,
then he went evasive and drew fire from at least half a dozen more hidden
weapons batteries.

Which is what he had
hoped would happen. Better for the enemy to shoot at him than his troops, with
him drawing them out of cover so that crew in orbit watching could tag the
locations of the weapons hidden amongst the rocks. The lizards still hadn’t
created a good replacement for their anti-air plasma weapons that utilized
‘fire and forget’ packages, and Mike knew well how to handle the glowing green
splinters flinging up at him from seemingly everywhere.

Rather than flying up
he went down, cutting under the firing cones of some of the batteries and
letting his superior shields take some hits while he kept moving and dodging
based off of the targeting tendencies he’d learned over the years rather than
seeing and reacting to the weaponsfire that was far faster than his craft. He
kept his speed up and hugged the terrain, eventually sliding up the slope and
peeking over the far side and down into another valley, this one wider and more
heavily forested. The entire area was choppy with washed out ‘roads’ that the
infantry and mechs were making use of. They were visible from the air but the
source of the anti-air fire was coming from the clumps of trees.

Mike saw them but
couldn’t study their placements, running the gauntlet as long as he dared
before pulling up hard and shooting straight up into the sky, taking some lucky
shots to his right wing stub that didn’t penetrate as he got outside of their
weapons range. The mage rolled his fighter over once high enough above the
terrain that he didn’t need to worry, which was when he noticed a blot on the
horizon to the west.

A quick check of the
battlemap showed him that the blot was a lizard cruiser coming overland.

“Where the hell did
that come from?” he wondered, setting a direct course for it while seeing a
drone corvette heading down from orbit on an intercept course. It was going to
be late, though, with the cruiser going to get to his ground troops before it
could get shot down…and with various Protovic settlements spotting the
countryside he couldn’t risk calling on orbital batteries to try and take it
out. Even then there wasn’t much time to get the ships into position. The
lizards had slipped a warship past them and it was going to be here within a
couple of minutes.

Mike mentally tagged
all the fighters in the air nearby to rally to him as he set course to
intercept the cruiser at least a short distance away from his troops on the
ground. There were 3 squadrons within range, each of which contained 10
fighters. The pilots were a mix of Bsidd Thetas,
Eppies
,
and Zetas, all medium to small sized variants, and flying Y-shaped skeets known
as ‘Behatis’ that were about 30% larger than Mike’s craft. They also had three
engines, each on the ends of the spurs, but had a larger midsection bulge than
the skeets did, which allowed even the largest Bsidd variants to pilot them if
necessary.

When a smaller Bsidd
was known to be the pilot, the cockpit was sectioned off and the excess space
given to modular upgrades, including cargo compartments, additional fuel cells,
a secondary shield generator,
comm
equipment, or a
variety of other tech to take advantage of the size of the craft. It was a
design concept built specifically for the Bsidd and only a couple of decades
old, but the behatis had already replaced all other aerial fighters in
popularity and was now the only design being actively produced.

Where the Calavari had
their Valerie the Bsidd now had their Behati, but Mike was sticking with his
skeet like the rest of the Humans, though his was the only one in the sky at
the moment. There were also a few gunships of Bsidd manufacture to deal with
lizard wisp swarms if they were to come their way, but so far that hadn’t
happened. The lizards had air assets on the planet, but since they were the
invading army rather than the defending one those numbers didn’t tilt into the
insane and most of what was here had been chewed apart previously by the
Protovic and their flying ‘Javelins.’

Mike was in his skeet
to help identify and take out surface targets, as were the other fighters
nearby, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do what they were primarily designed
for…which was taking down aerial targets, even if they were really big ones.
His skeet had two mauler cannons and the behatis had one each, meaning that
with enough hits they could disrupt the cruiser’s shields and get some hits
into the hull. Problem was they needed to take this thing down quick before it
had a chance to pound the infantry.

Mike had mechs in play
on the ground that would add considerable anti-air fire, not just from typical
anti-air batteries but from all their weapons, for you didn’t need any
specialization to shoot up into the air at a slow moving target. To that end he
accessed the battlemap and fed commands out to the mechs to fire every missile
they had at a point he then specified, splashing a virtual marker on the
quickly approaching cruiser.

A moment later little
plumes of fire leapt up from the ground at multiple locations down in the one
canyon and arced over to travel horizontal to the cruiser. There was a slight
delay, then a billowing cloud of fire and smoke built up on the leading edge of
the enemy ship that it kept trying to push its way through, eventually
succeeding but coming out of it with weakened shields…albeit temporarily.

Mike shot his fighter
ahead at the best speed he could manage, getting into mauler range before the
behati squadrons and pulling the trigger after selecting a double linked blast
from his customizable control board, sending two blue blips of
shield-disrupting energy at the front edge of the cruiser.

Klakten was with a
group of Betas down on the canyon floor when the overhead sun was eclipsed by
the front of the lizard ship as it appeared in the sky above them, crawling out
over the rocky ridgeline and firing a pink phaser beam down at a
madcat
. It hit the left missile box and nearly penetrated
the mech’s shields, but the Bsidd walking machine did what it did best and
leapt ahead into a running gait as it turned its weapons skyward and added to
the other streaks and orbs of weaponsfire reaching back up towards the cruiser,
making the next phaser burst miss by a couple of meters as the
madcat
pilot juked the mech around in a randomized pattern.

Apparently the lizard
gunners weren’t that good, but all it would take was one shot to kill Klakten
or any of the other infantry. Their armor and shields couldn’t stand up to that
kind of firepower, and there were already waypoints leading to places in the
canyon that would provide some cover in the terrain, though he knew the trees
wouldn’t do much to protect them. He sprinted with the others nearby over to
the edge of the canyon, putting as much angle as they could between them and
the rest of the enemy warship as it continued to creep out overhead and expose
more weapons batteries to the troops below.

More and more pink rain
followed, but at least it seemed to be targeting the mechs rather than the
scattering infantry. Klakten kept his rifles silent, knowing that shooting up
at the big ship wouldn’t do a damn bit of good and could alert them to his
position. When he got under the tree cover he weaved through the thin trunks
and found a bit of rock to hide behind, but he could still see the yellow/tan
hull above him through the breaks in the leaves.

Suddenly his battlemap
lit up with proximity warnings in the direction of the distant Protovic outpost,
indicating that there were enemy ground troops approaching.

Figured. Bring in the
warship overhead and flood them with a wave of infantry for double trouble. Oh
well, at least now he’d have something to shoot at.

The Bsidd soldier
variant pulled out one of his rifles and took up a better sniping position as
those around him were doing likewise just as the first little green bastards
appeared running up the center of the canyon out in the open…by the hundreds.
They flooded out around the feet of the furthest mech that was shooting at the
cruiser, then the eight-armed ‘
Docite
’ wheeled around
and punched two of them into the ground, mashing them to their deaths as point
defense weapons on the other arms began chewing the lizards apart by the
dozens.

Infantry weapons began
to spew tiny blue plasma streaks and
sammy
sniper bursts from both sides of the canyon, taking down more of the lizard
infantry that was only armored with a light protective vest that had never done
well against Star Force weapons. It might block a shot, or half of one
nowadays, reducing damage done but not preserving them as proper armor would,
so they went down easily, with many more coming up from behind those falling to
replace them.

With the locations of
the Bsidd infantry noted, the flood of lizards fanned out towards the sidewalls
and Klakten knew it was go time. He kept firing as he lit his six plasma rods
covering the end of some of his appendages and launched himself out of cover
along with a few of the others. He ran four steps, shooting one lizard in the
head before poking another with one of his glowing limbs. The blue tip
discharged, blowing a hole into its head before he swung the same rod to the
side and discharged from another segment into the arm of a second lizard.

With six rods to work
with he was hacking through the lizards with ease while still shooting some
with his rifle, throwing down so much firepower that they didn’t have a chance
and the other Bsidd were no different. Unless the lizards could get enough hits
to get through both his shields and his armor they weren’t going to be able to
stop them, though there was an ammo limit on his plasma rods and rifles, but
they’d
taken
that into consideration before they’d
mounted this assault and had plenty of backup ammunition for the latter.

Just then a huge pink
blast landed to his left, vaporizing one of the Bsidd there and at least a
dozen lizards along with it. The superheated air pushed out and knocked Klakten
off balance while leveling the lighter lizards. With horror flooding through
him he stood up and kept fighting, using the momentary opportunity to jab the
lizards closest to him that were on the ground and starting to jump back up
onto their feet after scrambling for dropped weapons.

Just then another huge
mass appeared underneath the lizard cruiser, with the Bsidd drone disc sliding
in over top of the mechs and into the gap, providing them cover while firing at
point blank range into the now
shieldless
underside
of the enemy ship. Several huge bangs sounds, though the infantry couldn’t see
what was happening from their vantage point and the fact that they were too
busy fighting to look, but those that could steal a glance like Klakten did saw
the lizard cruiser drop from the sky and land on the drone…with the drone
responding and pushing back and to the side to dump the now dead hulk over the
ridgeline so it wouldn’t fall on the troops below.