Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) Page 8

  The lizards were currently sending waves of tanks from the surrounding colonies in to the contested area, not to mention the troops already there that had survived the orbital bombardment. Star Force hadn’t taken the time to level everything, just enough to knock out the key structures. That meant there were plenty of intact buildings, not to mention underground structures that would have to be fought through to clean out and properly safe the area.

  That couldn’t be done while the firebases were under assault, so first priority came to protecting them long enough to get properly set up and have the mainline troops start coming down. After that the Clans would be free to push out and start hitting key targets.

  Iden ran from point to point, leaving Larkey and the others to head to their individual assignments as he headed to one of the currently descending transports, making sure to stay away from the box on his HUD that showed the no-go zone where the ship was slated to land. The Archon waited nearby, then as soon as the doors opened up he ran inside, bypassing a slew of thors and ravens as the mechs walked out, all of which were painted ponytail blue.

  Iden contacted the bay control as he ran and got one of the reserve mechs for himself. Typically he fought as infantry, but not every mech was assigned a pilot so that if one was damaged in the field that pilot could cycle back and pick up a fresh ride. It was one of those replacements that the striker claimed, with a pair of techs waiting for him next to the neo running a quick final prep when he arrived inside the mobile mech bay.

  “How we look?” he asked, climbing the ladder up to the catwalk to get to the rear access hatch in the back of the mech.

  “We’ve still got one empty module. Do you want to wait and have it loaded?”

  Iden shook his head. “No time. I’m going to be a mauler baby today anyway.”

  “She’s good to go then,” the tech said, stepping aside and waving him to the open hatch.

  “Tear ‘em up,” the other said as Iden telepathically connected with the mech controls and began sealing the hatch as he walked through into the small compartment. Upon a second mental command a series of panels on the floor depressed and slid aside, with a control harness rising up and locking into vertical position. Iden walked around to the front of it and stepped backward into the loose boots.

  He leaned back and the few other fasteners tightened around his waist and wrists while the boots snugged up firm against his own shoes. A headrest was fitted into place, then he felt the prompt from the new telepathic controls in his mind. He pushed the imaginary button and felt his vision go out for a moment, with his body likewise going numb as the machine’s status flooded his own senses.

  The next moment he was seeing from the perspective of his neo, his body’s stimuli replaced with the machine’s. He didn’t care for the crude sensation, for this interface was barely out of prototype, but he had full control over the war machine from that moment on and walked it out of its berth in the bay with no more effort than trudging around with a heavy backpack on. The neo’s steps were his own, not a computer-controlled driving experience, and now had instantaneous reaction speed compared to the old harness system that he’d actually gotten to be fairly good with.

  He walked in line over to the exit doors, getting hung up on the back of the flood of mechwarriors who had already been in the ship and ready to depart immediately. As such he was the next to last mech out, with Iden working the battlemap and tagging those mechs he wanted reassigned to him. Other formations had already been worked out, but since he was a striker they were immediately reworked around his needs.

  Two more neos and six ravens pinged in their acceptance of his redirect and he set a waypoint on himself as he maneuvered through the mechs outside the ship and found a bit of open ground. Overhead there were wisps everywhere around the firebase, with a ring of mechs firing so many sammies up that it looking like the finale of a fireworks display…except that it never stopped.

  Iden ran his neo out through the rain of lizard ship parts and popped open the left shoulder on his mech, inside of which there was a small anti-air sammy turret as well. He set it on auto + exterior control, allowing either his onboard computer or a controller back in the firebase to target the wisps above while he focused entirely on the ground fighting. His other shoulder had an anti-infantry plasma scattergun that he kept locked up, for the tanks ahead weren’t going to be needing that.

  The empty slot was on the ‘head’ of the neo, which was just a small lump that held a modular slot that hadn’t been filled with a weapon. The two mauler cannons in his arms were the primaries though, not to mention the hands on the mech, which could now grip things like they were his own. That sort of dexterity was worth using the crude mental interface, as was the running speed.

  When he got into the clear he sped up, but not as fast as he was capable of for the light blue mechs behind him were piloted by regulars who could not use the mental interface yet. In the future it would be able to access a person’s mind, but right now most of Iden’s access was him using his telepathy and the regulars didn’t have that or any other psionics.

  The two neos were using the harness controls that Iden’s mech also contained but that he hadn’t deployed. His ‘harness’ was just to hold his body still while his mind expanded out into the machine, allowing him to stride in a way that no computer could ever hope to match, giving him the fastest mech on the field.

  There were other Archons out there, but none of the other strikers were in them, leaving him top dog…amongst the Jinxes at least.

  There were a lot of other Clans operating out there, but as far as his Clan’s mechs keeping up with him were concerned, he had to ride the brake a bit to keep them in formation behind him. That formation right now was a line, with the other 8 mechs just covering ground behind him as they raced toward a pair of voltrons in the distance that were getting hammered by green plasma and quite a few pink phaser beams.

  It seemed the lizards had upgraded their tanks with the new weapon as well.

  “Two ravens per neo,” Iden ordered, mentally tagging the two ‘chicken walkers’ he wanted on his wings. “Stay fairly close to each other, but operate in kill trios and take some of the heat off those Ninja Monkeys.”

  Iden signaled the two monster mechs and let them know that support was coming, then he got a request from the starboard one barely a second later. He looked ahead on his battlemap and saw some huge new tanks that were packing a beefy version of the phaser, making the scene look something like an old Godzilla movie. Those big tanks were far in the back, with the smaller ones swarming up to the voltrons’ feet where a few dozen other Ninja Monkey mechs were hacking them to bits.

  “Damn that’s a lot of tanks,” Iden whispered off comm. There was no way he could get to the big ones without going through the little ones…nor did he have the long range weaponry needed to snipe them, though the voltrons were doing a decent job of that. There were just so many of them, and more were coming up in the distance. If they didn’t knock this group down now, there would be so many piling up here that they couldn’t suffer that multitude of weaponsfire, for their dominance relied on giving their shields a chance to recharge. Throw a lot of fire on them and they’d be reduced to taking armor damage.

  They had to split them up and keep them in manageable numbers, and the lizards looked like they understood that fact too and were spamming them without holding anything back, ground or air.

  As Iden’s shoulder sammy hit and downed a wisp in front of him the craft careened into the ground at his feet, causing him to jump up and to the right. He had the presence of mind to retract the sammy with a thought before his neo hit head first on the ground…but thanks to the interface he was actually able to roll the machine through a somersault and crawl back up onto his feet.

  “Nice dodge,” one of his ravens said as they passed him by, slowing a bit until he got back up to speed. He popped the turret back out and let it get to work, then accelerated up into a full run, leaving the raven
s in his dust.

  “Follow me in and pick up the pieces,” Iden said, actually managing a sprint in the mech, which was something that only a select few had ever achieved. He came up even with the voltrons and their defending mechs and punched on past them, skipping a few of the lizard tanks and diving into the sea of them until he ran out of running room.

  Then, with a boost from his jump jets, he leapt into the air as if he was doing the long jump and came down on his target mech further ahead, bending his left elbow and driving it down into the top of the yellow/tan machine and crumpling its weapon cupola on top, killing the crew inside as he drove the parts down into the interior as he pancaked the vehicle.

  Laying on his belly on top of it, Iden popped up the mauler cannon on his right wrist and fired at the nearest tank as he crawled his way back to his feet, with the ravens doubling up on his target as they finally came back within range.

  9

  April 17, 2755

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Kajit stood perched atop one of the buildings in firebase 3, his two clawed feet latched on to the edge of a stubby spire along with a host of other Lacvamat situated on his left, right, and behind him, cluttering the rooftop so to keep the ground clear for the walking troops as they waited. Kajit was watching the battlemap inside his helmet and the assault taking place on a colony several hundred miles to the north. The area in between them and it had been fought over and largely destroyed in the past weeks, but so far the Lacvamat had not been allowed to participate in the assault.

  That was supposed to change today, and right now a Clan unit was attacking the colony from the rear while mainline troops were doing most of the fighting out front and working their way into the lizard city. It too had an orbital defense battery, but the Clans weren’t going for it this time, rather they were sneaking in and trying to take down the small scale anti-air defenses first so the Lacvamat could join in on the assault.

  As it was, the war to conquer the planet was going Star Force’s way…yet slowly. The planet was huge and nearly a third of its landmasses were covered in lizard structures, meaning there were a lot of them to kill. Orbit had been secured and the Sentinels orbiting directly above the ring of firebases were a welcome presence, but a lizard relief fleet had arrived only three days ago and done considerable damage to Star Force’s remaining drones before being defeated. Most of the lizard ships had been hunted down and destroyed before they could flee the system, but there was no way to know when the next group would get here.

  Kajit couldn’t worry about that, for it was a naval matter and he was fairly sure they wouldn’t see lizard cruisers in atmosphere aiding the ground troops anytime soon, though that was always a lingering threat. With the lizard naval assistance out of the question Star Force was creeping its way across the planet, taking down more of the orbital bombardment capability as they went, but in order to get to it they had to take the colony first or conduct a solid raid into it, meaning the ground troops had to fight through the worst defenses the lizards could throw at them before Star Force’s naval power could be applied.

  That sucked, but there was no way around it. The ground army needed the Lacvamat involved, but the anti-air defenses that were holding the fighters back would also be effective against the flyers, and they were a lot less protected given their small size. There were encountering so much resistance from the lizards, however, that a change in tactics had been made to hit the anti-air batteries first so they could bring in the flying infantry support.

  That’s what Kajit was waiting on. The battlemap had giant no-go zones around the firebase where they weren’t permitted to fly, and right now it was better to keep the airspace overhead clear for dropships and larger transports to bring supplies down from the recent cargo convoy. A lot of heavy equipment plus foodstuffs and ammo were flowing to the surface, so the Lacvamat simply sat on the rooftops in full armor and waited for the go ahead.

  When the anti-air turrets would go down was not a thing that could be predicted, so Kajit spent the better part of 5 hours sitting and waiting before the giant red box over that colony disappeared. When it did he had to wait all of three seconds before the transit order was given, then Lacvamat all around him began to leap into the air and flap their armored wings to gain altitude, staggering themselves so they didn’t run into one another.

  Kajit waited until he found a gap then took off, using his small anti-grav jump pack to help him get airborne. He could fly under his own power, but the armor that he and the others wore made it difficult, for every part of their bodies, from their two feet to their thin, fleshy wings were covered in flexible, yet hard plates that weighed them down. It was a workout to move in them, but the anti-grav compensated for that with a light, constant lift during flight or a short burst of altitude such as now with the device adding to the leg kick that sent him skyward.

  The Lacvamat didn’t waste any time circling above and moved off towards the north in a long column. A few hundred miles was a workout, but nothing that would exhaust them. Had this unit been Human, Calavari, or any of the other groundpounders they would have had to be transported by dropship to the battle site, but the Lacvamat didn’t have that handicap. They’d fly there on their own, and do so at considerable speed once they flapped their way into a high enough altitude to begin a shallow dive and use the air resistance to launch themselves even further ahead.

  As such the long column looked like a series of waves heading up and down, but with each repetition they gained speed, using the anti-grav units to do most of the climbing and sparing them the fatigue. Alongside the 5,500 Lacvamat were a couple of squadrons of skeets flying escort to make sure the lizard fighters that were still roaming the planet in swarms didn’t try to ambush the flying infantry. Kajit and the others could fight them fairly well, but it wouldn’t take much of a hit to knock them out of the air and Star Force didn’t like personnel being treated as expendable.

  Kajit assumed that was why it had taken the trailblazers so long to call them into combat, waiting for the right moment when they could put their skills to use without facing the unavoidable loss of personnel. Lacvamat combat within Star Force was still in its infancy, but it had been laid out plainly to them that they were not the heavy hitters in a ground fight, but rather the support. That wasn’t due to lack of skill, but rather the differences in biology. If Kajit landed on the ground he was not going to be able to fight hand to hand well, especially since he didn’t have any hands.

  He had trained to make some use of himself if he ever found himself in that situation, but the Lacvamat were meant to stay in the air at all times and offer fire support to ground infantry units, which was why when he and the others finally arrived at their waypoint just outside the colony under assault they broke up into smaller units and went into a flock-wide holding pattern just behind the four Hoth-class walkers bombarding the city buildings with cleansing beams.

  Soon a slew of dots popped up on the battlemap throughout the city, with one in particular being highlighted. That was where he was supposed to go first, and along with 7 others he flew up about twice the height of the hoths and broke away from the mass of Lacvamat as about half of them also clustered up into groups and headed different directions. Kajit made sure to stay below the designated ceiling where the skeets were operating, for they didn’t want anyone to die from a needless head on collision while the aerial fighters were keeping what was left of the wisps off them.

  Kajit activated his armor’s shields and biased them 95% to the underside, trusting in their air cover to keep the lizard fighters busy and their topsides safe. That allowed him to better protect his wide profile from the ground view, for the wings on the Lacvamat were necessarily huge in order to lift their body masses and made for easy targets when spread wide.

  Speed was their best defense, but having a thick shield matrix underneath their wings helped greatly. If he or the others took any armor damage it was a signal to turn ta
il and run immediately, for the thin layer covering their wings couldn’t stand up to much pounding due to the weight issues. They simply couldn’t armor themselves like the Calavari could, so most of their defense had to be shunted to the shields and evasion.

  Kajit pinged in his approach and linked up with the ground unit they were tasked with assisting, getting revised targets and suggested approach vectors. He and the others split up further, conversing amongst themselves as how to organize this, then the Lacvamat turned the corner around one of the taller lizard buildings and suddenly they were looking down on a large firefight between a sea of lizards on the streets and a few clumps of mainline Human troops.

  There were no tanks or mechs on either side, just infantry, which made Kajit cringe at their numbers but also salivate at so many exposed targets…from the air anyway. They’d erected a lot of barricades on the streets, but the waiting pools flooding across the streets and into the buildings, or rather out of them, were just standing in the Lacvamat’s firing arcs.

  The trick here was not to get shot down, for so many plasma orbs fired skyward would almost undoubtedly hit him, if only through sheer accident. To counter that he picked up speed and angled for a low approach, charging his own plasma weapons that were located along the inside of his legs, as well as the secondary array that ran up his chest. Those concealed hatches opened, revealing an ice cube tray of slots, each of which slowly filled with a potent blue plasma orb.

  The two rifles on his legs also powered up, then when he swooped over the target coordinates given to him via the battlemap he fired them off onto that location in two blue streaks, then released the cluster bomb directly over top of it as he passed by. The tiny blue orbs went sideways a bit into a dispersal pattern to cover an area rather than hit a pinpoint target, then exploded out like bombs when they hit. After that Kajit fired his leg weapons twice more each as he buzzed the lizard troops, then came to the end of their crowd a moment later, turning the corner and putting a building between him and their hasty return fire that was too slow to target him.