Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (5 page)

But inside the destroyer they were in their natural
form and comprised the entire crew. All Star Force aquatics facilities and
ships were now split into two varieties, internal air or water. This was a
water destroyer, just like two of the battleships were water craft as well, but
despite the Elarioni being far superior in terms of water movement and combat
they still were commanded by the Archons and had a mixed relationship with
them, for while the Humans were slower and all around
newbs
in the water they were also gifted strategists and came equipped with psionics
that the Elarioni couldn’t match.

The differences between the two were so great that
combining crews or infantry teams would have been detrimental so the binary
design had been established, though every ship had facilities to accommodate
the other that Trevor needed to replenish his oxygen supply which was now at
23%. It had been continually replenishing from oxygen in the seawater and some
internal cycling, but the rate at which he’d been breathing it in had been
greater than the resupply.

Knowing from experience it was better to be
conservative with his air than reckless, he needed to top off before continuing
with the oversight of the lizard colony security and beginning stages of
reclamation. That and he knew he was going to have to pee before too long and
he couldn’t just take his armor off mid ocean, especially with the pressure
this far down.

Trevor swam through the Elarioni-designed corridors
that kept a touch of overall Star Force motif to the infrastructure until he
was led to a small area of the ship that was just a single room, but with
adjacent water compartments that could be converted to air if necessary. It was
located at the top of a corridor so no Elarioni could accidentally fall inside,
and on top of that it was covered by a sealed door that the crewmember
retracted so the Archon could enter.

His head pushed up through an energy field separating
the air from water and he got his arms over the edge of the small pool and
pulled himself up…feeling his own weight again as he got a knee underneath his
torso and stood up. That was one of the challenges with aquatic field work, for
even if he had been swimming around by hand and leg the entire time the neutral
buoyancy would wreak havoc with an Archon’s training state. As it was, his legs
were just beginning to remember their normal weight after floating around more
or less effortlessly for many hours.

He walked aside and out of view of the small pool,
finding several facets to the room that was much akin to a set of personal
quarters/equipment room. There were foodstuffs without water, for the ship’s
‘atmosphere’ was drinkable, ambrosia, uniforms and armor replacements…and most
importantly, after his oxygen resupply station, a restroom.

Trevor deactivated the safety interlock within his
armor and had it begin peeling apart along the chest, then down the seams of
the arms and legs, allowing him to step out of the single-piece suit while
leaving the spread out monstrosity in place like a scarecrow. He didn’t bother
bundling it up for he was going to be getting back inside it within minutes,
but he did walk over and pull an oxygen line from the recharger and connect it
to the suit before heading into the restroom to relieve his bladder.

He grabbed a few foodstuff ration bars to chew on and
a cup from the storage compartment, then walked over and dipped it through the
energy field and filled it up with water before sitting down next to the pool
and having a snack. Some people thought that drinking water that Elarioni were
swimming around in was gross, but he’d gotten used to it. Like on an air ship
the ‘atmosphere’ was continually cycled and cleaned, making the water nearly pure.
Plus the Elarioni didn’t produce any toxins as far as Humans were concerned, so
he didn’t mind. Actually the water had a microscopic sweetness to it, though
he’d been told that was just his imagination.

Trevor kept his break short and
redonned
his armor, now with an air supply back up to 100%, and jumped back into the
pool letting his momentum carry him all the way down into the water. No
Elarioni were waiting for him, which was proper given that he was a fellow
member of Star Force and not a foreign guest who had to be watched at all
times.

Getting his head oriented as to which way was which on
the destroyer, he swam off through the corridors towards the bridge where he
was going to get to work patrolling the extraneous facilities situated around
the main lizard colony…which from now on was Star Force property, at least
until the MCV got around to dismantling it all.

5

March 23, 2692

Jafat
System (lizard
territory)

Irad

Arvak sprinted across the dry, sandy ground of the
wash and up to the tree line on the far side, tucking his arms in as the Bsidd
pushed through the brush and under the forest canopy. He didn’t stop or look
back, but kept running as fast as he could manage with a countdown indicator on
his helmet prompting his speed. In less than 3 minutes he had to be in position
and he still had a lot of ground to cover.

The trees weren’t helping, for they were more like
bushes and had branches coming out of their trunks at all levels. With his
armor protecting him from scrapes, thorns, and other concerns Arvak blew
through the thinnest sections on as much of a straight line as he could but
every now and then he’d hit branches that wouldn’t bend and he’d get stuck,
with his 8 arms often getting tangled up and holding him back.

That was why he was tucking them in now as the theta
variant pushed his way across terrain. He was approximately Archon-sized and
the fastest of all the Bsidd varieties, making for good scouts and skirmishers,
though today he was tasked as a sniper and had to get into position before the
heavy infantry met up with the lizard army pushing their way.

This was the fourth day of ground battles on
Irad
in what looked to be at least a multi-month campaign.
While the nearby planet of
Ulmed
was lightly
inhabited this world was not. It was full of lizard colonies that the navy was
still pounding on from orbit to break through their defense shields, but even
when they did that there had to be ground ops to go in and clean up.

Arvak’s
group hadn’t gotten
any of those assignments yet, rather they were assaulting facilities outside
the defense shields. Right now he was in mountainous, irregular terrain where
the lizards had burrowed underground to build a series of bases, how many Star
Force didn’t yet know, but they were virtually impervious to orbital
bombardment. A Calavari unit had been sent into the region to establish a
foothold and firebase, then through them the Bsidd were moving forward and
flushing out every bit of lizard infrastructure they could find.

That had eventually resulted in the lizards coming
aboveground and mounting a series of counterattacks, with the one about to go
down being the largest yet. Arvak had been sent with a number of other scouts
racing ahead to grab some valuable points of high ground that looked down on
the dry riverbed that he’d just ran across, knowing that the lizards would have
to pass through it and into the open briefly. If not they’d hold up short of it
and give the Bsidd troops maneuvering options…which it didn’t appear was going
to happen.

On his battlemap there were numerous reports of enemy
movement through the trees, which was protecting them against air attacks,
though there were reports of wisps starting to come up out of the ground in
several nearby and previously
unscouted
locations,
suggesting that they were going to buy the ground troops enough time to get to
the Bsidd and potentially overrun the two forward staging bases they’d
established.

Arvak didn’t intend to let that happen, so he ran on
as fast as his two main legs could carry him and only popped out his other
‘arms’ for additional propulsion when he was going up inclines. Eventually he
got to the rocky hillside that overlooked a portion of the dry riverbed from
about 600 meters away and began scaling it where he could. There were no paths
up so he just took his best guess and climbed through the overhanging vines and
loose vegetation, finding rock where he could and leveraging himself up using
various grip points on his appendages in lieu of the fingers his race didn’t
have.

With only a handful of seconds left on his countdown
he found a ledge that gave him a narrow slice of riverbed in view and decided
that was going to have to be good enough, kneeling down and pulling his sniper
rifle off his back. He synced it up with his battlemap and used the spotter
data from others to align his targets, focusing on three points of the
riverbank. Two of them were obscured from his position, but the third was not.

As he swung his sights around to cover that area he
saw other icons imposed on his HUD indicating his fellow snipers. Some were in
position already while others were still moving, with their ID tags making it
clear that they were friendlies even if he couldn’t visually spot them. In
contrast there were box-like warning markings indicating the approximate
position of the enemy troops and within a few seconds the green-skinned lizards
began pouring out of the forest and crossing the riverbed by the hundreds.

The bulk of the Bsidd army wasn’t close enough to
engage them there, leaving it up to the snipers to thin the enemy down as much
as they could. Taking to his task, Arvak and the other snipers in position
began unleashing solid
sammy
beams down from elevation and onto the riverbed. Each was tinted blue, as most
Star Force energy weapons were that could be modified as such, and lasted .62
seconds in duration. That gave the snipers enough kill power to take down even
the mauler variants with one shot, punching straight through their armored
vest, thick skin, and dense musculature to poke out the far side of their
bodies and melt some sand behind them.

It also gave Arvak some sweeping capability, with him
deliberately drifting his aim as he fired to catch two or three lizards with
one hit, inflicting a cleansing beam-like gash across their bodies or even
severing their heads completely off if the angle and beam path matched up with
their necks. To be honest he wasn’t trying for any of that, he just needed to
do damage to as many as he could before they crossed into cover again and there
were so many it was hard not to hit them. With that in mind, wounding five or
six with a quicker flick of his sights was preferable to a solid, clean kill on
only one.

Most of the lizards he was seeing were standard
variety, for the maulers didn’t work against Star Force troops given their
armor. The lizards’ forearm blades were vicious against exposed
lifeforms
, and should the Bsidd have been engaging them
hand to hand without armor they would have been a serious threat in groups, but
their blades only tickled the purple/black
battlecasts
they were wearing.

The flexible, stretchable armor was unique to the
Bsidd to accommodate their varying sizes and movement ranges during fitting,
then it would harden into a form unique to that Bsidd on the portions of its
body that didn’t move much. New armor suits were kept in gelatinous state,
similar to a wet suit, so that when Arvak or another needed a new one they’d
put it on then go through a minute long series of movement drills allowing the
armor to adjust to the individual’s body before hardening where appropriate.
After that it was more or less standard armor akin to what the other Star Force
races wore.

His set was for thetas and wouldn’t work for any of
the other Bsidd variants, but it would work for all thetas, meaning they didn’t
have to get individual fittings and everyone could use stock units. He knew the
Archons that were leading the Bsidd army had their armor personally molded to
their bodies during fabrication. That was a perk of their
superhard
armor, and applicable due to the fact that there were so few of them. Star
Force would never have been able to do the same with the Bsidd and their
rapidly growing numbers.

Arvak kept popping out blue
sammy
beams along with a few others from nearby
targeting the same patch of dry river that was quickly becoming wet with lizard
blood. His shots only fell on a small section of it, with others having better
angles and disappearing behind trees as they shot across his sights, but they
were felling a good number of targets. It didn’t seem that way given how many
were crossing the river, but every dozen that he mowed down was a dozen less
for the infantry to deal with a few minutes from now.

Arvak had expected the river crossing to be quick, but
as he stood his position and continued firing more and more lizards kept coming
out of the forest in a long wave that seemed as if it would never end. Knowing
that he had to keep focused and firing nonstop, else let a lizard past that he
otherwise could have killed, Arvak forced himself to not think about the
numbers but as he stayed within his mental sniper targeting zone his stomach
clenched up with apprehension…for he’d never seen enemy numbers like this
before, not even in training
sims
. They were
literally everywhere, and armor advantage or not, the Bsidd could easily get
overrun if they didn’t play this smart.

And even then he wasn’t sure how many would be too
many to take down.

Tvey was waiting in formation with the other Bsidd
betas as they jogged through the forest behind one of the mechs breaking a path
through the tree branches. He was mid left in a row of four and six rows behind
the pair of silver-clad Archons leading his group that stretched back in a line
nearly 500 meters long, and there were other lines moving forward nearby like
snakes through the thick trees. He knew from his battlemap that the enemy was
close, and when they got to them they were going to be fighting the tree
branches as much as the lizards, given their enemy’s smaller size.

Tvey stood taller than the Archons and even a bit
taller than a Calavari, though he massed considerably less. His body resembled
the trees around him, with numerous appendages sprouting out from a nonlinear
central body, all of which was covered in armor that gave him some sense of
security, knowing that both the shields and the hardened plates would protect
him from numerous plasma blasts before they got through to his skin. It was the
lack of movement in the trees that worried him.

As he ran forward, stepping over occasional limbs that
the mech had snapped off, he got deployment orders on his HUD from the Archons
and suddenly the long line began to split apart. Tvey went left along with a
group of three others and headed to a random position in the forest, coming up
on the waypoint then holding position with the others as he read the orders
coming across in text.

The four Bsidd all activated their six appendages that
held plasma rods, or more accurately were plasma gauntlets, for in lieu of any
actual hands they were just a pole covering the ends of their appendages for
approximately half a meter in length. The ‘
lightsabers
’
as they were commonly referred to
operated
the same
as the plasma nubs that the aquatics division used, in that they held a
contained amount of the destructive, superheated gas within a shield until
physical contact was made. When it occurred the plasma would be released then
replenished, giving them a melee weapon in addition to the gun-type weapons
that Tvey and the others wore on additional appendages.

The orders that came across were to cut branches and
create a kill zone for them to operate out of before the lizards got here, and
the beta gladly lit up his six blue
limbends
and got
to burning through the horizontal sticks. The smaller ones were clipped
instantaneously, but the larger ones took several hits to get through, with a
slight pause in between being required for the plasma to reform within its
containment shield.

He and the other three hacked out as much room as they
could around several trunks, then picked up the branches and piled them in three
spots, pushing them down into a thick enough wad that they thought the enemy
couldn’t crawl through. That would constrict their approaches but still give
the Bsidd multiple options to reposition elsewhere if needed. All around them
other small groups were doing the same thing, with the mech walking back and
forth and plowing down roads along with breaking down some entire trees and
positioning them as barricades using its six arms that did have hands…something
the Bsidd pilots had to learn to use with a lot of practice.

Tvey heard/saw it crunching away a ways ahead of him
then saw the explosion nearby as it vaporized a tree trunk or two with a mauler
blast…but it wasn’t aiming at the trees, rather the first of the lizards
swarming around it. That mauler impact was followed by several others and an
assortment of additional weapons, not only from the mech but from the
surrounding Bsidd infantry.

Tvey hacked away a few more limbs then cleared them,
with his other three
fireteam
members doing likewise
as they set themselves and looked ahead, their plasma rods glowing ready and
their pair of gauntlet rifles sticking out between the six blue
lightsabers
as they heard rocket impacts against the mech,
indicating that the lizards were coming with more than just their standard
plasma rifles.

Then suddenly they were upon them, with dozens
appearing amongst the trees and running straight at the Bsidd, bypassing other
groups nearby heading straight for Tvey. They started popping green plasma orbs
a moment later as more of the lizards swarmed the other positions, but there
were so many targets nearby that he couldn’t monitor them or even the mech,
suddenly taking shield impacts and seeing the lizards stop just short of their
little kill zone.

Tvey and the others fired back with their rifles,
popping blue plasma streaks that were far more lethal than the lizard versions.
The type of weapon dated back to Star Force’s origins, and rather than replace
it with orbs or another weapon system the Star Force techs had simply kept tweaking
the design to its now extremely efficient and powerful concentration of plasma.
One hit was all Tvey and the others needed, which was good, for it looked like
they were going to exhaust their full ammo supplies if they lived long enough
to use them all.