Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (10 page)

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 angles 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.