Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) Read online

  Another target pinged on his battlemap, in approximately the same location, and he circled around the buildings to come at them from a different angle. Meanwhile the other 7 Lacvamat in his group were doing the same, with the ground troops feeding them targets as quickly as they could hit them. He hit his second one, then a third before he noticed at a glance that a Knight wedge had used one of their soft spots in the flood of lizards to press a barricade and physically push it aside. Now they were moving out into the larger group of enemy infantry, hiding behind their overlapping physical shields as they led a column of Regulars through the breach point.

  Kajit circled around and made another strafing run, never knowing how many he killed for he was flying past them so fast he couldn’t look back to see the damage he was doing with the array on his chest, but he could catch a glimpse of his leg rifles when he angled them forward onto targets he was just coming up on.

  After that last flyby he received a different request that had him circling around another building and flying back over Star Force troops that were pushing their way towards the breach point. Kajit came down to street level, landing on a bit of clear pavement as the Regulars nearby parted to give him room, not wanting to be caught up in his wings, but he neatly tucked them into two vertical fins bracketing his head as he landed.

  There he waited a few moments before an Archon ran up beside him and climbed on his back. The green-armored warrior was heavy, but with full power applied to his anti-grav Kajit was able to get them both up off the ground with some very heavy and fast wing flaps. He had to maintain that heavy cadence to keep them moving while reducing the anti-grav down to a sustainable level, else the capacitor would empty and he’d have no assistance whatsoever for the few seconds it took to recharge.

  The Archon sent a waypoint to Kajit’s battlemap, not even bothering to say a word of thanks for the ride. That wasn’t rude, but rather a reality of how Star Force fought and the intensity of the current battle. They were both here to do a job, and the less distractions they had the better.

  Fortunately Kajit didn’t have to fly far, for the Archon wanted dropped off on the other side of the lizards so he could flank them. He took him around by a safer route rather than flying directly over the horde, then came to a stall over the ground, tipping his back end down and allowing the Archon to slide off without interfering with his wing flap.

  As soon as he was free, Kajit took off heading to another of the communal attack points given that he hadn’t received any more specific targets. He landed several more plasma attacks directly over the lizards before their formation eventually broke and they began to retreat…not to escape the enemy, but to fall back into more favorable points for ambushes and other means to kill the Human troops.

  Kajit took it on his own volition to fly in low and attack some of those isolated lizards, even coming down so low that he grabbed one of them by the back of the neck with both of his feet and dragged him into the air half a meter before firing one of his leg rifles directly into his head. He dropped the corpse and banked hard right, using his anti-grav heavily as he tucked his wings to avoid his left from running into the side of the building on the narrow street.

  He kicked off the wall then popped his armored sails out again, taking several plasma blasts to his shields as he reset them for universal coverage after seeing what was behind the nearest lizards. Trusting in his training and resisting the urge to run for the sky, he flew down to head level and extended his wings out as far as he could, then rammed a whole line of retreating lizards and clotheslined them in the chest/face.

  Kajit got caught on them and would have tumbled if all the bodies hadn’t held him back. Once his feet hit pavement he retracted his wings and balled up on the ground, then a hail of blue plasma flashes surrounded him as the four Regulars that had been chasing after this dozen or so lizards mowed them down. Kajit got shot two more times, but his shields held up long enough for the Regulars to finish them off as he held his somewhat panicky cocoon.

  “Are you alright?” one asked, walking up beside him as Kajit unfurled enough to stand up.

  He curved his long neck towards the suit of bipedal grey armor. “No armor hits.”

  “Thanks for the takedown,” the Human offered before running on.

  “My pleasure,” Kajit said to his retreating form, then he fully unfurled his wings and took to the sky again as he searched the battlemap for more local target pings.

  10

  July 1, 2755

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  “Damn,” Larissa said, heading for the door of the command center in firebase 19. “I’m going in. Get everything there now.”

  She didn’t bother to wait for a reply from the other Archons in the control room, busy interfacing with her helmet’s battlemap and comm system tracking down the nearest skeet in the air and recalling it to her as she made her way to the roof. Her Bsidd were pressing into another lizard colony, much as they had been doing the past months, but the sneaky bastards had thrown them another surprise…and this one was a full-fledged trap.

  Containment walls the size of buildings had sprouted out of the ground, having been buried under dirt and trees with no visible sign of their presence, and locked her troops inside a ring that surrounded the colony. Meanwhile subsurface tunnels began spewing out heavily armed lizard reinforcements, including tanks and wisps, all of which had been held back while the city defenders had died fighting over the heads. They’d sacrificed them to get the Bsidd in position above them, then sprung the trap.

  That was cold, but very typical of the lizards. She just hadn’t seen hidden walls be used before, and unless they had some subsurface building apparatus that had gone into effect since the invasion began, this trap had to have been built in place before this world ever came under attack.

  That wall was keeping the infantry in and the mechs out, for it was too high for them to jump over. The wall was literally a series of skyscrapers having jutted up out of the ground, and was something that Larissa had never expected. What the hell had the lizards been thinking?

  None of the other colonies had seen this type of defense system, and what was the point of just doing it here, when the entire planet was being overrun. It made no sense to her, but it was happening none the less. Larissa swung by the equipment room on the way to the roof, grabbing odds and ends and adding them to the armor she already wore while stuffing her pack as full as she could get it.

  When she hit the roof she had to wait a few minutes, then out of the southern sky a skeet appeared, heading her way fast. It looked like it was going to overshoot, then braked hard until it was over her head, with the pilot fully aware of what was going down and sharing the trailblazer’s urgency. He lowered the skeet down to her, turning off the shields in the process so Larissa could jump up and grab on to the underside with her hands.

  With those stuck into place with the grip enhancements in her armor’s gloves, she swung her feet up and latched on with those two, hanging from the underside of the fighter and squishing herself up along its surface as aerodynamically as she could.

  “Go,” she said, with the skeet’s shields reforming over top of her and the building disappearing from her Pefbar vision. Trusting in the pilot, her face was buried in the view of the grey armor plates and her body tucked into the IDF that was likewise extended along with the shields. It didn’t feel like they were moving, but her battlemap said otherwise. This skeet had been engaged in combat in a neighboring colony that was mostly overrun, but now it was headed a bit further out to where the lizard trap had been sprung.

  The new firebase wasn’t too far away, for it was logistically improbable to operate an invasion with ground troops over long distances. It was going to take at least 20 minutes for the pilot to get her there, but on the upside the Bsidd carried the heaviest armor of any Star Force infantry, and she hoped that most of them would be able to survive until she and the other reinforcements got there.


  “We’ve got company,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to be able to set you down gently. Do you have a jump pack?”

  “Unfortunately no.”

  “The skies are full of skeets, and I’m going to take a beating just getting you to the wall.”

  “Take the low road,” Larissa said, studying the battlemap of what was happening ahead. There were so many skeets pounding the troops inside the walls and the mechs outside that some of the ravens had started to go down and the others were pulling back. “Just get me to the wall. I can climb over.”

  “That’ll take too long. If I get you on top, can you find your way down the other side?”

  “Yes,” the mage said confidently.

  “Alright, I’ll get you there, but this is going to be rough…and you’re going to be a target once you drop off.”

  “No, they will be,” she said icily as a pink flash hit the shields to her left, with there being so many fighter icons around them that there was no way to know which one had just shot the skeet.

  “Standby for release. I’m going to get you low enough that you can sense the roof with your Pefbar, but I’m not going to be able to come to a complete stop.”

  “Just get me under 100 miles per hour. I’ll bleed off the rest.”

  “You sure?”

  “No time to argue. Drop and run and don’t look back.”

  “Ok. When I signal, don’t hesitate. Ten seconds.”

  On the battlemap she saw the skeet zipping low to the ground, buzzing treetops then passing low over a field that led up to the wall where the pilot curved it to the right and traced a path around the wall as swarms of wisps descended to chase after them. The pilot had the skeet moving fast enough to prevent them from getting any good shots off, but there was no way he was going to be able to drop her off at this speed.

  When she saw the skeet begin to gain altitude, rising up very near the wall as it continued its breakneck speed laterally, she understood what the pilot was doing, using the wall to shield the fighter for as long as possible. Suddenly the speed dipped off and the skeet rose up above the height of the wall, exposing it to fire from the wisps inside the perimeter.

  Larissa readied herself, then ‘felt’ the rooftop of the wall appear beneath her, flashing past rapidly. That gave her mind something to focus on, and she began summoning a telekinetic field just below her when the shields disappeared.

  “Now!”

  Larissa let go of her grip points, expanding the telekinetic field into a crash bag that pushed against both the ground and her, slowing her fall of only a few meters but doing nothing to stall out the insane forward momentum. It did allow her a moment to simultaneously create a spherical bioshield around her entire body, and when that touched the rooftop she felt the impact. The silky smooth bubble didn’t offer much friction resistance, but there was enough that it started to spin her around, head over heels like a hamster in a ball.

  Before she got spun into dizziness Larissa also emitted a different kind of telekinetic field outside the shield, this one acting similar to a crash bag except that it sustained itself rather than deflating and acted to bleed off momentum as if the bioshield suddenly had a blanket of glue covering it.

  Larissa still spun herself sick before she rolled to a stop, but fortunately she had been able to use her Pefbar to see where she was going the whole time and avoid careening off the roof. Trying to hold still for a moment and flush the disorientation out of her still spinning head, she extended her Ikrid out and picked up the minds of the lizards in the nearest of the fighters. Most had chased the skeet, which was now well outside her mental range, but a few of the enemy craft had noticed her drop and were swinging back around to target her.

  She froze one mind when it got within range, with it flying on its previous course and passing by her on the outside of the wall…then crashed into the ground below. The next one was also going too fast for her to do anything with other than freeze it, but it flew out of range before hitting the ground and recovered thereafter, though it was now outside of weapons range.

  The third one she managed to get within her Ikrid range long enough to do a more intensive mental hack, taking control of the lizard and having it fly the wisp low over the wall and stop in front of her. Had it not been under her control it could have shot her easily, for she was still woozy and couldn’t have managed more than an awkward roll if necessary.

  Larissa hobbled over to the fighter, her balance not yet fully returned, and made like Garfield against its hull. She had the pilot take off again and fly her down along the inside of the wall. She didn’t have full control, only able to point him where she wanted to go and allow the free sections of his brain to handle that task, which was always a risk, but until her head settled she couldn’t try for anything more.

  The wisp got her close to the ground and she figured it was good enough, so she let go and fell again, this time with far less forward momentum, and used another telekinetic crash bag to cradle her landing. When her feet hit she fell over, more from the lingering disorientation than anything else, but she slowly got her legs under her and forced herself to move. Larissa was in the interior slice of the grassy plain and an easy target, with the nearest city buildings about half a mile away.

  To her far right she saw lizard troops and tanks, about 2 miles away, maneuvering around in the open area. She spotted some Star Force icons nearby within the cityscape, but the trailblazer couldn’t worry about them just yet, for several fighters were redirecting towards her. The one that she’d hijacked began to turn around through a sharp turn, but Larissa froze it again at the edge of her range, with the turn not being sharp enough to avoid the inside of the wall.

  It crashed into it softly, crumpling the front and dropping it down to the ground mostly intact. She let it hit before she released her hold on the lizard’s mind, then she reached out and began freezing every fighter within her range. That wasn’t enough to keep all of the weaponsfire off her, for a few pink bolts hit nearby, but their aim was off…and all of these fighters appeared to be equipped with the upgraded weapons, which gave them far more range than the old school wisps.

  Larissa’s balance returned as she ran, with her accelerating further as it did. She crossed to the nearest buildings in under two minutes, disappearing into a narrow street and not sensing any lizards in the nearby buildings, so she ducked into the nearest one, breaking down the door when the handle didn’t respond.

  Now that she got her head out of the view of the fighters she pushed out her Ikrid and Pefbar to make sure the building was empty, then she took a closer look at her battlemap, trying to find where the Bsidd were and what their condition was. The city/colony was some 18 miles in diameter and her troops were spread out across more than half of it when the trap was sprung, but only after a group of lizard tanks had led most of their mechs outside the boundary line for where the wall came up, leaving the Bsidd infantry inside with only a few mechs as backup.

  The combination Bsidd/Mainline skeets that had been providing the ground troops air cover had been driven off or destroyed by the wisp plumes, meaning the enemy now owned the airspace as well, and unless they came low enough for Larissa to psionically grab they could stay up there and rain down phaser blasts on any troops outside the buildings, which meant the few mechs they had left were going to be easy targets unless they could find some sort of overhang or hangar to hide out in.

  With no aircraft above to relay battlemap signals the connection between the troops within the city was going to be hit and miss as buildings got in the way, but Larissa was able to see where most of her troops were, including several ‘loud’ pings for assistance that were not signal stealthed. Those would be visible in orbit and through layers of rock and metal, with one of them occurring less than a mile away.

  That was enough for Larissa, so she took back to the streets and held close to a sidewall at all times, trying to avoid making herself a target from above and diminishing the firing angle
s when she did. A couple more fighters smashed into building sides was all it took to get her close to the nearest ping, but as she got there more signals began to pop up inside the nearby buildings. She diverted towards those, breaking in another door only to belatedly realize it wasn’t locked.

  Larissa didn’t have time to waste, for the longer this trap was allowed to play out the more of her Bsidd would die. How many had already gone down she didn’t know for sure, but there were markers all over the map indicating downed troops, including a pair nearby a group of 30+ live signals amongst a sea of lizard minds.

  The trailblazer pulled her rifle off her back as she came up on a trio of stragglers probably intending to flank the Bsidd, but she saw them coming before they came into her hallway and gunned them down before they had a chance to fire a return shot, though she did have to freeze the third one to accomplish that. She hurdled their stupid bodies and kept running towards her troops, getting a feel for what was ahead.

  These Bsidd were bunkered up in a large commons area, and by ‘large’ she meant more than the size of a football field. There were lizards everywhere around them, but mostly on one side. She could feel several of them dying per second, indicating that there was an ongoing firefight and her Bsidd were doing what they were trained to do when they were outnumbered…turtle up if you couldn’t run and share damage with shields and armor, using their own bodies to block for one another and hope to outlast the enemy’s body count.

  There were over a thousand lizards in that room alone, with more stretching off into adjacent hallways out beyond her Ikrid range. Through a mix of anger and confidence Larissa found a way up to the second level where there were balconies overlooking the main complex. She could feel some lizards up there, undoubtedly shooting down on her troops.