Star Force: Internecine (SF55) (9 page)

That would put fear into those races sitting on the
fence and might even convince the five engaged to rethink the wisdom of pushing
this conflict as far as it seemed they were intent on going…which was to
annihilate the opposition.

Davis had already blacklisted those five races from
Star Force purchases of starships and construction contracts, not that there
were many available given the heavy war production, but those vacancies had
moved up others on the waiting lists and that in turn would also affect the
power struggle down the road. But he knew he had to do more than that, so with
the bioweapon attack mystery solved he began laying out a plan of numerous
little tweaks, nothing major, that he would begin to use to reshape the ADZ in
this time of turmoil and leave the territorial penalties to the future when he
had the ability to actually enforce them.

He also had two requests from races outside the ADZ
still standing, and decided to act upon them now. Both were races with worlds
along the border of Epsilon Region, which Star Force hadn’t colonized very
heavily as yet, but of these two races one already traded with the ADZ and the
other one wanted to begin to do so in considerable amounts, with both
requesting a foothold world to act as an emissary to the rest of the growing
community.

Giving them an entire world wasn’t going to happen,
but he would give each a single regional slot on a scheduled Alliance World
coming online in Epsilon within the next 14 months, along with the promise of
more territory if they proved themselves valuable. That would also mean that
two of the slots that would have gone to present ADZ members would be taken
away by outsiders, sending the message that the power struggle wasn’t going to
be a purely internal affair and Star Force could bring in as many outsiders as
it wanted, meaning new players in the game that, as far as percentage went,
would diminish the current ones.

Growth was the key to everything, and he needed to
make the races fighting one another pay in that regard. If they kept fighting
and wasting resources and lives then they’d be curtailing their own growth
while others expanded even further with Davis’s assistance. That might not be
enough to get the blood feud stopped, but it would be an ever-present reality
that cooler heads would respond to as they saw the writing on the wall.

Hopefully that would prevent some of the races
considering throwing in with either the Scionate or the Lacvamat from adding to
the internecine.

It wasn’t a good situation, but Davis had learned long
ago that even in catastrophes there were always opportunities if you looked
hard enough. The real question was whether or not the Archons would be able to
hold the line without the support they deserved.

He didn’t know if they could or not, for he was
reviewing the stats daily as they came in, but he’d learned long ago not to bet
against them. He would do his part on the interior, and hoped they’d be able to
pull another Houdini, keeping the Skarrons pinned down and out of the ADZ
interior for a good while longer.

9

December 15, 2553

Plenx
System (
Dvapp
Territory)

Rvitx

Paul waited, tucked underneath a rocky overhang as the
Skarron troops moved all around him enroute to a major offensive. They’d gotten
reinforced by a trio of transports that had made it down from orbit, with his
warships having gunned down two others as they came in. The ones that landed,
though, had added just enough troops that the Skarrons were mounting one last
push to try and break the Star Force troops that were all that was holding the
native Dvapp defenders together. Both sides had been so wore down that the
number of troops on the planet was a small fraction of what it had been in the
beginning, and a windfall of new reinforcements from either side would easily
tip the scales.

The Skarrons hadn’t gotten a large one, but it was
enough that they thought they now had the advantage, and it was all rooted in
the Type-1 walker they’d received and was now covering for the rest of the 26
walkers and infantry in the attack column moving across the rocky terrain
towards one of three remaining Dvapp cities. The rest were either evacuated or
destroyed, with the planet essentially having been turned into a debris field
with more dead than you could count, especially with the Dvapp corpses melting
away and not sticking around long enough to be noted.

Most of Star Force’s losses had been in the way of
machinery rather than troops, with them having more people available than mechs
and fighters, but they’d still lost a lot, and without those valuable machines
the excess personnel wasn’t much of a help, especially when they didn’t have
enough places on planet to house them. Most of his dispossessed troops were now
back up onboard the jumpships, including those commandos and Knights who he
didn’t have replacement armor for. He wasn’t sending them into combat without
it, so he’d had to evacuate them.

That left a small core of Star Force troops to head
off the Skarrons while the Dvapp tried to rouse what limited resistance they
could. Nearly all of their combat troops had been killed, with only militia
remaining. For some reason the Skarrons were targeting the Dvapp harder than
others, not just in the number of systems under assault but in killing all those
they came across. They’d actively pushed the residential areas rather than
gunning for the Star Force troops, atypical of their normal methodology which
had them going at the strongest enemies and most highly valued targets straight
off.

But that didn’t matter now. This last assault was
going to make or break the invasion of this world, and if Star Force couldn’t
turn it back the Skarrons were going to run the table and eliminate the
remaining settlements, and there was going to be nothing he could do about it
short of bringing down his limited warships for fire support…and that was
practically suicide with the Type-1 in place, not to mention the other walkers
with their anti-air capabilities.

If he’d had more drones he could have taken it out
regardless, but he couldn’t waste what he had and still hold onto orbit. There
were Skarron ships up there, and if he weakened his fleet enough they’d pounce,
but for the moment Star Force and the Dvapp were the stronger and keeping the
enemy back from low orbit, aside from the occasional resupply run that they
pretty much had a 50/50 chance of intercepting. Paul just wished they’d gotten
the transport bringing in the Type-1, for that beast of a machine alone was
going to decimate what mechs he had left.

In this late game scenario it looked like the limited
reinforcements were going to win the Skarrons the planet and that no matter how
much Paul tweaked their defenses it just wasn’t going to be enough. He was
going to have to bring the warships down and try to take out the Type-1, but
then there would be nothing preventing the Skarrons from bringing their own
ships down into the atmosphere after they finished off his fleet in orbit and
pounding the crap out of his surviving ground troops.

Either way the Skarrons had already won, or so his
Dvapp colleagues had pointed out, wanting to start evacuating the few people
they could in the hours they had before the Skarron assault column got to them.
Paul wasn’t going for that and had his mechs and handful of fighters standing
behind in ambush positions within the varied terrain, given they were able to
move around much easier with jump jets than the Skarrons could walking overland
on their spindly legs.

They couldn’t take down the Type-1, but they’d stand a
decent chance against the Type-3s and 4s. There was one Type-2 in the mix as
well, but that one would just have to be dealt with the hard way. Chew up the
others first and they could isolate it, but the key to it all was taking out
the Type-1. So long as it was in play they were doomed.

And they had nothing that could contend with it short
of a fleet of drone warships.

They were beat, pure and simple, and damn the Scionate
for pulling out when they did.

That was the general sentiment in the mini war council
between Paul, a handful of his Archons, and the Dvapp, which was when the
trailblazer quoted Darth Vader and left their headquarters, deploying himself
out ahead of the rest of his troops that he’d carefully arranged into the
ambush formations he wanted.

Don’t
underestimate the power of the Force.

With him concealed in his tiny hollow with his shields
turned off so the Skarrons couldn’t track him just in case their sensors could
penetrate the rock, which he doubted, he waited and watched with his psionics
as infantry and then several of their walkers passed by his position. He could
actually see a piece of one of the Type-4s out the open side of his hollow
standing atop a ridge that gave him a view of its upper half, but it was too
far away to notice him behind them and only a few inches of helmet showing on a
direct line of sight.

No, Paul was tucked away nicely and now in the center
of their army waiting for the enormous Type-1 to come across his position,
hoping he’d guessed right about what path it would take.

The seven segmented walker was mid formation, leaving
it with flanking units on all sides to protect it from attacks, though in truth
there was nothing around that could harm it. Right now it was providing aerial
cover for the rest of the mechs and capable of throwing up a flat, circular
shield above
itself
or the nearby area to protect
against bombardment from orbit or fighters, though Star Force didn’t usually
use any bomb-type weapons. They wouldn’t get through the anti-air
lachars
anyway.

Stretching his Ikrid to its limits Paul waited and
watched through the rock behind him, sensing the infantry minds and those in
the nearest of the walkers until he finally felt the big one coming slightly to
the east. He thought it was going to be close enough, but given the height of
the segments this was going to be a stretch as was and he didn’t want to add
any more meters than necessary. He knew he couldn’t reposition without drawing
attention, and right now his only chance was to stay hidden. Get even close to
that thing and it’d bathe the surface with so much plasma they wouldn’t even
have to aim to hit him, just spam the area with shots.

He felt the minds in the first segment and tracked
their movement, mentally plotting out the closest they would come to him. Each
piece had its own crew, which worked together to move the giant centipede
around, up until they decided to split it apart. That didn’t happen unless one
segment needed to be jettisoned, because the shield generating strength of the
flat ‘plates’ it created to defend against heavy attack were much stronger when
all the segments were combined, though the armor alone was enough to protect it
against an insane amount of weaponsfire.

But it would do nothing to block Paul’s Ikrid.

When the first segment hit the closest point to Paul’s
position, with the first of its legs coming down some 250 meters to his left,
he reached out and tried to connect to one of the minds he was sensing. His
contact was very light, given the range, but he focused his mental power and
tried to make it as efficient as possible. At first he didn’t think he was
going to be able to do it, then he finally got a very faint connection that
allowed him to pull information from its senses and allow him to see the inside
of the walker along with a few of its surface thoughts.

He quickly realized it wasn’t the one he wanted and
switched to another, then another. It wasn’t until his sixth connection that he
found the Skarron that had the control panel that he wanted.

Implanting the suggestion proved even harder than
reading its senses and took numerous layered attempts to get the impulse firmly
imbedded to cut the power to the plasma cannons and divert it to the shield
generators to block an incoming orbital bombardment that would destroy the
walker if he didn’t scrape together as much power as possible.

It didn’t work at first, but with the layering going
on more and more eventually it just snap activated the Skarron carried out the
suggestion. There was a large, audible crackle outside as the shield formed
over top the big walker even as it continued to plod forward, prompting him to
act quickly. He switched to another mind in the crew pit and hammered it hard
with layering, feeling it pop a moment later as the rest of the crew focused on
the loss of power to their weapons and the shield going up, prying the other as
to what was going on.

With that confusion taking place the other Skarron
lowered the boarding ramp, with Paul bolting out of cover the moment he felt
him hit the switch. Having planned out his run through the terrain via
Pefbar
earlier, he climbed up a small ridge, shot by a half
dozen Hobbits that he didn’t even bother to flip off, and ran underneath the
outer legs of the forward segment of the Type-1 as it continued to walk
forward.

As it moved a long, thin tendril extended down from
the underside forming a stairway. Cringing, he saw it hit a rock and twist a
few seconds before he got to it, but the trailblazer jumped up onto the narrow ‘straw’
before it had a chance to break off and climbed the odd staircase in a hurry,
needing to get inside before the plasma cannons overhead came back online.

A jolt underneath his feet signaled that the Skarrons
were pulling the boarding ramp back in, with him only halfway up. He didn’t
bother trying to reacquire mental control over the crew, instead run/jumping up
it and staying ahead of the collapsing sections behind him in a race to get to
the hatch before the steps beneath him vanished and he fell.

With the help of his jump pack he took several meters
in each step, coming up to the opening and ramming into a Skarron poking out
the entry parlor to see what was happening below. He drove his armored shoulder
into its face, denting into its mount as he hit and rolled/jumped up onto its
back as its arms bent over and tried to grab him with more of a limb-bending
attempt than he had ever seen one try, for it didn’t have any weapons on them
to shoot him with.

Paul didn’t bother fighting it, merely Fornaxing and
sliding across its back and heading through the extremely large interior of the
walker and into one of the auxiliary crew bays. The main control pit was
further up, with these Skarrons being techs/gunners, and Paul bypassed them as
well, neutralizing them with his Psionics and running past, heading for the
‘bridge’ of the segment and having to climb through several levels in order to
get there.

When he got inside the giant control room he pulled
out his rifle and started shooting, having to throw a lot of shots into the
Skarrons to take them down, then even more at the ones coming up from below to
counter him with some small weapons they’d appropriated from somewhere. He took
care of them as fast as he could, then those that came after him unarmed,
resulting in a corpse-filled room with even more minds staying away below.

Rather than go back down after them he went for the
control consoles and began inputting commands, drawing off the memories of
those below when he encountered something unfamiliar, and stopping the big
walker in its tracks. He ignored the questions coming in from the other crews
and disconnected the forward section, a process that took an incredibly long
amount of time.

When it finally separated from the other 6 pieces he
walked it forward and rotated it around, powering up the plasma cannons and
using a blind targeting lock to get them to remotely shoot without their
gunners manually targeting each one, then began pouring plasma into the
unarmored connective tissue that he’d just exposed.

Catching the other segments off guard he took the
moment while the plasma was pouring out to activate the missile launchers in
the uppermost section of the segment and fired on the nearby walkers…unloading
the entire payload in his segment and damaging a lot of the Type-4s while
pouring most of the missiles into the somewhat distant Type-2, enough at least
to get through its shields and damage its armor on the starboard flank, though
the thick plates and sturdy shields protected against the missiles far better
than he’d expected. He’d hoped to take it down, but then again he only had the
missiles in his segment to work with and the walker’s anti-air was chewing up a
lot of them.

By that time the second segment had been disabled so
badly by the pointblank plasma fire that it had become dead weight, the other 5
segments disconnected from it and pulled back, leaving Paul with his intact
segment on the other side of the still standing damaged one and able to use it
as a blocker as his armor began taking hits from the nearby walkers he’d just
fired upon with the long missile barrage.