Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (2 page)

His sniper skills weren’t quite that good, but like
any proper commando he was up to the challenge. Besides, this was just an
‘extra’ challenge to kill time while his food digested, so he didn’t put much
mental effort into it. Relaxing, he fired off round after round, lightly
goosing his accuracy without picking any of the robust targeting drills. This
was one of the perks he had for getting a ground assignment, and even if he
wasn’t going to go all in on it today he was definitely going to avail himself
of the range.

In recent years he’d been fighting lizards, which
meant he’d spent a considerable amount of time onboard jumpships. All Star
Force ships had training facilities on them, but they were nothing compared to
what
planetside
facilities contained. Basic sanctums
had shooting ranges, but nothing as large as this. Nor did they have underwater
swimming courses. At best they’d have 2 or 3 pools for lap swimming and that
was it. The volume of a ship, even one as large as a jumpship, had its
limitations…and over the years Star Force had come up with an insane number of
training chambers and drills that could be built.

This training facility was a tier 2, the second
highest of all and he’d been told that was deliberate given how far away they
were from any other facilities. That meant that even thought Orval was out in
the middle of nowhere he had one of the best locations to train in. The tier 2
facility was even good enough for the Archons on Shiva to use, for there hadn’t
been a separate sanctum built for them yet. That virtually never happened,
underscoring just how impressive this training facility was.

Orval knew fighting the lizards was important, but
after so many years of doing so he’d seen his skills begin to plateau and that
wasn’t a good thing. There was word coming down through the ranks of a major
crusade in the planning stages, and when/if that actually happened he wanted to
be ready…not burnt out and stagnant. That’s why he’d taken this assignment, to
get his combat mojo recharged and to grab another few levels of advancement
before it was time to do whatever the Archons were planning.

But he also didn’t like sitting back and doing nothing
to help out, so this assignment was about damn near perfect. He wouldn’t have
to do anything if there was no trouble, but he was here just in case something
happened and that was an important function, especially considering all the low
level commandos that he was surrounded with. For a few of them this was their
first field assignment, and learning to train without the trials as motivation
was a big hurdle that he was trying to help them overcome…along with a lot of
other things.

They were capable, as all commandos were, but amongst
the lot of them there was very little combat experience. That’s where he and a
handful of others came in, for if they did come under attack it would be up to
them to lead the defense and carry the rookies through it, making use of their
limited skills while counteracting their lack of experience with his own.

Orval didn’t think that was going to happen, but
someone had to be here just in case it did and that counted as doing something,
for if he wasn’t assigned here then someone else would be. Right now that
person was out there fighting, so his holding this position contributed and
allowed him to train like he needed to…and that more than made up for the
ever-present phantom chill that hounded him.

2

March 18, 2692

Jafat
System (lizard
territory)

Ulmed

With the Star Force fleet largely engaged over the
inner planet of
Irad
, the lesser defense force around
Ulmed
was met with a handful of warships that
preceded two large jumpships. With the lizard ships tied up in a battle that
they were easily going to lose the massive transports began moving down near to
the atmosphere with their defensive weaponry swatting a pair of enemy cruisers
that tried to take poaching shots at them.

By the time they settled into as low of an orbit as
they could half the lizard fleet was destroyed with the others soon to follow,
so the defense shields on the jumpships were lowered and the four aquatics
battleships were released. Their smooth hulls looked quite alien to space, but
they were airtight and had gravity drives sufficient to lift themselves out of
the water and to fly through atmosphere…and those same drives also allowed them
to descend from orbit, with the large ships dropping below the jumpships and
into the upper atmosphere where they began to bleed off orbital speed.

That friction slowly built into fireballs against the
defense shields covering each of the ships that were decelerating from orbital
speeds using their underpowered gravity drives. Slowly the turbulence around
the meteors faded and their hulls reappeared, with them continuing to bleed off
lateral speed. Two were deep blue colored with their telltale ridges running
fore to aft with the thinner ‘wings’ spreading out on either side but the other
two, while identical in shape, were colored aqua blue almost to the point of
being neon.

All four ships came down together until they were
halfway down to the surface of the mostly water-covered world, then they split
apart so that they reached the ocean waves at different locations around where
the lizards had established their primary aquatics colony. According to
intelligence reports this world was the second one colonized in the system and
as such hadn’t seen as much development as
Irad
, but
the lizards had already begun building within the water in addition to on the
small tracts of land. Those water-based troops had to be eliminated before Star
Force could lay claim to the system, hence the inclusion of the rarely used
aquatics division in this assault.

Four battleships for an assault against an entire
world was light on the extreme but if the lizards had only one, or even a
handful of fortified locations, it would be more than enough to break through
their defenses…which were known to be formidable. Star Force and the lizards
had tangled aquatically on a few worlds, but the largest conflict had been the
initial one on Atlantica, during which both sides had learned much about their
opponents. That said, Star Force’s aquatics division had been wholly revamped
since then, and the two previous assaults that had taken place hadn’t left any
lizard survivors to inform the others how they’d been defeated.

When the battleships hit the surface they came down
gently, sinking into the water with their defense shields covering the hulls in
a thin, protective layer that the enemy’s weapons would be hard pressed to
penetrate. Of the four ships one of the dark blue ones came down directly over
the location of the lizard colony, and as it pushed its hull into the water a
swarm of missiles came up at it, hammering the shield.

That was part of the plan, for the ship was acting as
a distraction and continued to descend down through the deep water until it
reached weapons range, then a shield column extended down to the top of the
base, which was made up of numerous domes built on the seafloor that covered
all directions for miles. The tiny tendril of energy pushed through the water
and contacted its lizard counterpart covering the largest central dome where
Star Force knew they were building aquatics warships.

Those were in the water nearby, but not directly over
the base for they had been out on patrol and not in position to defend against
an overhead assault. Their firepower was significant, but it didn’t match the
number of missiles coming up from below. The two combined would be enough to
get through the battleship’s shields, so it only had a short window of
opportunity before it would have to withdraw and recharge…but it wouldn’t need
long to do damage.

The shield column made contact with the dome shield
and immediately a blue streak flew down the vacuum and hit the opposing energy
barrier, missing the sidewalls of the column by half a meter of clearance, else
the mauler blast would have breached them instead of the lizards’ shield. The
first blast destabilized a patch of the dome’s defensive layer, with the second
punching through and allowing the shield column to dip down another few meters
and touch the hull of the dome. The lizard shield reformed around and inside of
it, for it was being emitted from within the base rather than a lateral
generator.

The problem with that was the Star Force shield
column, acting like a giant straw, wouldn’t allow lizard shield energy to flow
into the breach from the surrounding areas to help counter weaknesses and
breaches, leaving only a small patch inside that was recharging from direct
transmission from the emitter. That was sufficient to reseal the shield over
the light crater in the hull, but when the aquatic’s warship switched weaponry
and the Ta’lin’yi firecracker beam came down with the white/gold pinpricks slamming
into the shield patch, it punched through with only a slight hesitation.

Suddenly the base of the shield column broke contact,
blowing apart along with that section of the dome as the talon cannon hit the
matter of the hull and did what it did best. A shockwave rippled out through
the water all the way back up to the battleship as another shield column
tracked down into the now damaged and unshielded dome to deliver another huge
punch, with a likewise impressive explosion when it contacted and sent an immediate
talon blast down.

The battleship sat there and reached out into the
lizard infrastructure, attacking it with impunity as the missile swarms
continued to mount and drain shield strength. It wasn’t until they’d racked up
sufficient energy loss and the lizard warships were nearing weapons range did
the Star Force vessel begin sniping down the incoming missiles with its own
intercepts. The tiny glowing ‘fish’ spit out of several holes in the hull and
swam towards the missiles, knocking out several with a single hit and ‘popping’
the water around them out into short-lived voids.

That disruption not only allowed the secondary
explosion to hit more of the clumped missiles but it knocked others askew and
slowed their approach, with only a few making it through the counterattack to
hit now that the ship was defending itself, which allowed the shield to begin
to recharge a bit as more missiles from the nearby warships began shooting in
laterally and a slew of hammerheads motored in as fast as they could, intent on
ramming the sides of the Star Force battleship with their full array of plasma
nubs.

Holding off on any return fire the battleship
continued shooting out intercepts to lengthen the duration of its stay while it
broke through dome after dome below. Some were air domes, others were water
ones. Either way they were taking heavy damage and attracting a lot of
attention while the other three battleships settled into the water at their
more distant positions and began releasing the onboard craft and infantry that
this one was holding onto as it played bait, soon to retreat to the atmosphere
to recharge its shields and reposition to another location to continue the
assault.

Davrel Stinson flexed a bit in the cockpit of his
aquatic mech, still in the hold of the other Human battleship as he waited for
the go order. Right now his body was strapped into the control harness similar
to that in a neo, but his movements were not translated directly into this mech
for his body didn’t match its configuration. The harness he was in was
essentially a full body controller for the live videogame he was about to play.

It wasn’t a drone, as he was situated inside it, but
the various arm, finger, leg, and even toe movements controlled a variety of
functions in the mech…with him very eager to get the new prototype mental
interface. Word was it was still experiencing glitches, but once they got it
hammered out he could forgo the tricky harness that took such a long time to
master. The up side was that aquatic mechs didn’t move as quickly as their
ground-pounding cousins, but now with a heavy dose of Elarioni influence they
no longer had the option of just walking around on the seafloor or motoring
along as clinging brawlers.

Right now his mech was in transit mode, meaning its
various arms and other protrusions were tucked into the hull in a little bit of
a homage to Voku transforming tech. When Davrel finally got the go order he
followed another mech out into the ocean water, passing through the shield that
separated the bay from the exterior and feeling a bit more resistance as he passed
through, for the ocean water was more compacted at this depth.

The mech looked like a finless dolphin, stretching out
long with a narrow silhouette that allowed it to move through the water far faster
than previous designs. Davrel had been one of the first aquatics regulars and
stuck with the military ever since, hence he was one of the few capable of
piloting these mechs that weren’t Archons given the intricate design interface
that most of his peers hadn’t been able to pass the
qualies
on.

As soon as he was out into the ocean he directed
towards one of the lizard destroyers nearby. It wasn’t on the seafloor, nor
would his mech be. Now the mechs were full-fledged anti-ship weapons covered in
armor more dense than what the battleships carried. It was rich in corovon, and
therefore very expensive to produce, but it gave them extreme tankiness against
the lizard weapons…so much so that he sped his mech towards the six distant
warships with little worry. He was going after the largest one and knew the
others wouldn’t be able to do much more than tickle him throughout the process.

A slew of missiles came his way as he got close, with
the other mechs heading to different locations leaving Davrel on his own. His
mech didn’t have any intercepts, for they wouldn’t fit in its tiny hull that
was about twice the size of a
thor
, so he just let
them hit the shields and explode, with the wall of water that he was pushing
ahead of him helping to dampen the blows as he closed on the destroyer.

Before they could be stripped off his mech entirely he
triggered a transformation with a combination of thumb button press and right
leg extension. The smooth hull of the elongated mech bunched up, pulling its
tail up and into the hull that then plumped out into what was more recognizable
as a mech body…but one without legs, for he was well above the seafloor and
didn’t need them.

Four arms did emerge, and as he got close to the
destroyer he rammed into the side of it and latched on, extending ‘growths’ out
from them that wrapped around the hull like the vines from a plant and allowed
him to hold on despite the destroyer being covered by its own thin shield that
soon snapped under the pressure. The
Vel’koz
-class
mech then opened a port on its ‘head’ and pressed it up against the hull,
firing through a short shield column a very thin mauler stream rather than a
blast, with it cutting into the hull like a laser and blowing out a seam as
Davrel moved the mech around a bit as it clung to the ship.

He rotated it around enough to cut out a badly shaped
circular plug, then cut the beam out and loosened his grip on the ship with the
backside of his mech getting hit with a few more missiles as one of their
corvettes approached. The aquatic mechwarrior knew he still had some time so he
pulled back one of the arms, retracting it into a stubby protrusion that he
then pointed into the breach, ramming the ‘shoulder’ of the mech into it.

Once that connection was made he used a very tricky
interface to control and ‘see’ the arm as it jutted out and, with a lot of
sheer physical force, punched its way into the destroyer’s interior and began
ripping it apart like the inside of a blender.

Then came the difficult part, for one of the big
design advantages of this mech was its multi-tasking capability…which was quite
a strain on a pilot who wasn’t used to seeing behind his back. As the corvette
came in it extended its two large claws, which it obviously intended to latch
onto the Star Force mech with and pull it off, or maybe to
snip
away the arms holding it to the hull. Either way the sheer crushing power they
were capable of would do damage to his mech, though his armor and skeleton
strength would keep it from being a one pinch kill.

Using an elbow bump he triggered the extension of
another arm from the mech, this one much thicker and claw-like of its own.
Davrel knew it was much more nimble, with the lizard corvette basically being a
battering ram with two big scissors attached, so as it came within touching
range he reached out with his own pincher and grabbed the port one on the enemy
ship while gripping tighter with the three arms wrapped around the destroyer’s
hull. Using the raw leverage power built into his mech he caught and halted the
corvette’s momentum, then swung the ship around slowly until it banged against
the side of the destroyer.

Davrel pushed it back, letting go his grip, then
easing his hold on the destroyer enough to twist the ‘head’ of his mech around
and point the mauler orifice towards the lizards’ version of a crawdad. A short
shield column sprang out and briefly linked the two ships with a waterless
corridor that the mech used to fire a full sized mauler blast through rather
than the tiny cutting beam…all the while Davrel continued to lash his whip-like
arm around inside the destroyer, further wrecking its interior.