Star Force: Marauders (SF63) (10 page)

BOOK: Star Force: Marauders (SF63)
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Mason took a deep breath and let it out slowly in an
audible sigh. “This is bigger than anything the Marauders have tackled to date,
but nothing compared to what we’ve gone up against versus the lizards or
Skarrons. I don’t want any sloppiness in the transition, because I expect we
all have a bit of rust to shake off. Life as a
merc
is a lot less strenuous, and we’re going to have to dust off our old skills to
make this mission a go. We’re going up against an army again, so don’t
underestimate the opposition. They’re primitive compared to us, but they’re not
just randomly hitting Tieor. They’re doing so with a well-executed plan thus
far, and we’re going to disrupt it as much as we can. Expect reprisals, and if
I say to pull out don’t hesitate.”

“They also have tank and air support, so we’re going
to have to be cautious. We’re not devoting ours this early, so this will just
be infantry ops. I’m leading the first mission to see what these guys are made
of, and until we get a proper name we’re referring to them as ‘Tangos.’ Once I
get a feel for the Tangos we’ll send out multiple strike teams, but I’m taking
an initial team of 20 out, with volunteers getting first dibs…and since the
guys on the ground aren’t up to speed yet, you guys get first call. If you
don’t feel up to this then don’t step up. I need sharp guys for this first
mission, given that we don’t know what we’re up against yet.”

“Gear up regardless. Unless you’re in your bunk I want
you ready to fight at a moment’s notice. I don’t know how this is all going to
play out, so we’ve got to be ready to adjust and adapt quickly. Also, there are
going to be other mercenary units out there fighting alongside the Tieor
troops. We’ll try to avoid them as much as we can, but don’t put it past some
of our competitors to stab us in the back if they get the chance, so keep your
eyes open and our base secure. Going forward there are no guarantees.”

Mason made eye contact with several of the varied
races around him, seeing looks of anticipation and gravity. These were all
seasoned vets that knew the score, and like himself they were ready for a
bigger challenge than usual…especially if they were going to get paid a lot to
do it.

“Alright, get going,” he said, with a clap of his
hands, prompting everyone to start moving in a controlled hustle out of the
lounge, save for Willis who was sitting on the couch with the hole in his
shoulder still plugged up with healing packs.

“You stay put,” Mason said as he left, pointing a
finger at him for emphasis. Next order of business was securing a contract with
the locals, so he headed back to the bridge to give the defense force the good
news and to settle on a price.

 
 

10

 
 

July 18, 2735

Noop
System

Tieor

 

“What?” Mason half-yelled into his helmet as he ran
through
Tieor’s
streets. He and two other Marauders
were heading to a breach point in the city of
Machna
that had just come under attack, but the Tangos had caught them out of position
by finding some subsurface tunnels to skirt the perimeter defenses. No one else
had caught it yet, and the Lieutenant knew that they were the only ones that
could plug the hole in time. For all he knew, they could be sending an army in
through the shafts, but if they could catch them confined they could bottle
them up. He had other Marauders closing in, but his trio was the closest.

“Dropships coming down,” another Marauder told him,
situated back in ‘safety’ and coordinating all of their disparate positions
throughout the chaotic city as the populace began to flee, making running
through the streets problematic, even in armor, for Mason was constantly having
to avoid or bump out of the way the locals scrambling about. “Big ones, headed
for the outskirts of the city. Looks like they’ve got a lot more troops heading
your way.”

“Who the hell are these guys?”

“Don’t know, boss, but you’ve got a few minutes before
they hit dirt.”

“Copy,” Mason said, knocking aside a
Vichni
as the fat alien jumped out in front of him from a
nearby building. The
merc
half twisted to make it a
moving hit, for every second he delayed the enemy consolidated its strength
inside the city.

Not much further up he came to a cross street of
smaller width and turned hard left, running into a group of
Donklap
and half jumping over them with his legs hitting their short heads. He turned
the fall into a crude somersault, landing on his armor’s pack and turning over
onto his feet. A moment’s delay and he was back up into a run after making sure
none of his weapons had fallen off their attachment hooks in the tumble.

The other two Marauders were still with him a few
strides back when they got to the tunnel cupola, which was ominously empty. The
subsurface transit system moved throughout the city, but didn’t pass beyond it,
meaning the Tangos had found a service link or something to make their way into
it. With no people moving about, it meant they were down there and had killed
or scared off everyone.

Mason pulled his rifle off his back rack hook and
primed it, finally flicking on his energy shields now that there were no
pedestrians around to run into as he got to the stairs and dropped to a knee as
he slung the side of his body around to the right and scoped out the descent.

A yellow plasma orb flashed by his head, with him
firing a blue lance back almost on reflex into the knot of troops stationed
below behind some trash cans and other impromptu barricades they’d rearranged.
With just that second of a glance he knew they were holing up to protect more
troops coming through, which meant they had to act quickly.

Mason fired off three more shots, causing two of the
Tangos to duck down while one kept firing at him, finally grazing his shoulder
and draining some energy off his shield.

“Blow through!” he ordered just before the other two
Marauders caught up to him. At his word they didn’t slow and made the turn at a
run, barreling down the stairs and firing as they went.

Mason stood up and followed them down the moment they
were past, with all three fanning out laterally so they could fire without
blocking each other. They all took hits, but between their shields and speed
they got on top of the defenders within a few seconds, firing into them at
pointblank range before switching over to hand to hand and knocking the dozen
or so of them aside with fist, foot, and rifle butts.

It was a risky ploy, but Mason knew from experience
that if they waited it would only get worse. The Lieutenant smashed one of the
unfamiliar bipeds back into a support pillar, with its thick, armored arms
flailing wildly with the hit as it spun off the stone to the floor. A green
plasma streak hit it on the way down, then two more from the other Marauders
burnt through the rest of its armor before Mason was back to hand to hand,
flipping another over and onto the ground before squeezing off a single shot
against one that Vick had knocked back.

The mess of brown armor around them dropped to the
ground over the next half minute, with the red stripes on the blue Marauder
armor gaining a host of
melty
dots alongside them,
but all three
mercs
had avoided any penetrations and
sought to avoid any further chance by going around and pumping shots into the
fallen Tangos, dead or not, just to make sure. They had about 10 seconds to
work through them before another two came up from below and opened fire.

The
mercs
broke up and ran
to the sides of the landing at the base of the stairs, with Mason diving over a
trash can and coming up out of a combat roll firing. A few crisscrossing,
well-aimed shots downed those two Tangos before they could do much damage,
though Mason’s left thigh now sported a new melt mark just above the knee.

“Down!” he yelled over the
comm
as he ran forward and over the next set of stairs.

“On your six,” another voice said, with Mason glancing
back and seeing four more Marauders at the top of the stairs coming in to back
them up.

Mason didn’t wait on them, leading his pair and them
down further into the tunnel junction and immediately seeing the Tango’s entry
point, along with another three coming out of a wall panel on the other side of
the monorail line that crossed left to right. He fired on the first of them
immediately, veering right to expose the firing lines of those behind him as
yellow plasma came back his way. He was able to dodge the first few shots, then
a fireworks display of blue lances shot out past his left side and took down
the Tangos after a few seconds of repeated hits to their chest armor.

A fourth was just coming out of what looked like a
maintenance crawlspace, so Mason shot him twice before running up to the
position and pulling him out the rest of the way, dumping him on the ground for
the others to finish shooting as the Lieutenant put his barrel into the shaft
and fired repeatedly down it at whoever else was in there.

“Blow it,” he ordered, knowing that one of the men
behind him had some small explosives in his pack. Mason and most of the others
didn’t, carrying ammo resupply for what they expected to be an extended firefight,
but they’d learned long ago that a few ‘boom booms’ could come in handy now and
then.

A yellow orb flew out of the shaft and hit Mason in
the helmet, partially deflecting off his regenerating shields, but the rest got
through and melted his faceplate, giving him a distortion over his left eye as
he ducked to the side and away from the shaft. Two other Marauders stepped up
and fired inside, then the other came forward with a pair of grenades and
chucked them in.

“Back!” he said as Mason and the others scrambled
away. A few seconds later they detonated and blew out half of the wall in a
plume of dusty debris.

“Check it,” Mason ordered, still to the side and
inspecting his helmet from the inside with an armored finger pressing against
the melt point to see if it had broken through the material or not. Fortunately
it hadn’t, but there wasn’t much material left and he figured another solid
shot would make it through to his face.

“Back!” he heard again, turning his face away as
another large explosion burst out in all directions, covering him with small
bits of debris as the Marauder added another grenade.

“Sealed,” he heard through the dust, then a gust of
fresh air from above pushed the grey fog aside and he could see the mess of
wall and machinery blocking what had once been the maintenance shaft.

“Put an eye on it,” Mason ordered as he headed back to
the stairs.

One of the Marauders pulled a small camera out of his
pack and stepped up on a trash can so he could reach the ceiling, where he
glued it in place focused on the grenade damage. He activated the telemetry and
checked that the controller was getting the feed. Once confirmation was made he
hopped down and ran off after the others, leaving the live feed to monitor the
debris in case it was dug out and the Tangos tried to come through again in
lieu of leaving a man behind to watch over it.

“Lieutenant, get to a building top now,” the
controller said.

“What’s wrong?” Mason asked, looking around and
spotting the tallest building near him and heading towards it as the rest of
the Marauders split up.

“I need visual confirmation of the landing ships.”

“On my way,” the ex-commando said, finding the local’s
equivalent of a stairwell and climbing up the emergency ladder shaft that ran
next to the lift. He didn’t want to bother with it, not knowing how many other
people were cramming inside or how long he’d have to wait, so he climbed the
plate-like steps until he came to the top cupola that ended in a phone
booth-like structure on the roof. He ran outside and looked around, guessing as
to the direction the landing craft would be based on the current fighting going
on in the southeast quadrant.

Sure enough that’s where the ships were, three of them
in total and spaced at least a couple miles from the perimeter defense lines
where the Tangos were currently engaging the defense forces and
mercs
stupid enough to line up in their path. The Tangos
spreading out and trying to flank those more or less stationary positions were
what the Marauders were going after, supplementing the defenders without
getting themselves involved in more than they could handle with the few dozen
infantry he had deployed.

He didn’t recognize the design of the ships, but two
were clearly troop transports. The third, however, was a grounding craft,
carrying underneath it something that Mason hadn’t seen in a very long time,
and the sight of the white sphere sent a shiver down his spine.

“Confirmed, control. That’s a Skarron Type-5 walker.”

“How the hell did these guys get their hands on one of
those?”

“I don’t know, but we don’t have anything here that
can take that down, and neither do the locals.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Keep our fighters the hell away from that thing. In
fact, don’t let any of our units get within spitting distance. We’ll work on
their infantry…and see where this goes.”

 

Trayven
walked into
Brayden’s office, knocking on the open door to get his attention. The Colonel
of the Marauders looked up from the datapad that had the report from Tieor on
it, with him going over the military aspects of this unidentified army for the
umpteenth time.

“Are the ships loaded?”

“Not yet, we’re still waiting on a couple of
transports,”
Trayven
said, holding up a
datachip
. “We just got another courier from Tieor.”

“Bad news?” Brayden guessed, gesturing for his ops
commander to toss it to him. It’d been several weeks since the first courier
arrived, but to send another so quickly meant something had to have changed or
they wouldn’t have wasted the ship.

“See for yourself.”

Brayden inserted the chip onto his datapad and saw a
number of files on it, but first among them was labeled ‘Skarron Walker.’ He
immediately opened it up and saw Mason’s brief notes indicating that a pair of
Type-5 walkers were being operated by the invading army with no sign of Skarron
or Hobbit involvement. Regardless, they were trashing what heavy weapons the
local defense force had and were shutting down the airspace around them with
just their plasma cannons…and Brayden knew that their own plasma weapons would
be next to useless against that armor.

“Shit,” he pronounced, pulling up the auxiliary files
that held a multitude of data on both the walkers and the rest of the invading
army’s movements and reinforcements.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Get every rail gun and missile mount we have loaded
up, plus all the small scale explosive ordinance.”

Trayven’s
eyes widened.
“We’re actually going after those walkers?”

“We’ll charge extra,” Brayden quipped, his eyes still
glued to the updated report.

“Don’t you think that’s more than we can handle?”

Finally looking up from the datapad, the Colonel
sighed. “I honestly don’t know. But if we can bag even one of them I want the
Marauders to have it on our rep. I have no illusions about single-handedly
saving Tieor, but there’s fighting to be done on a scale we haven’t seen since
we left Star Force, and a lot of credits to be made in the process. I don’t
know how this is going to play out, but we need to be there and no other
merc
unit is going to be able to touch those walkers. They’re
ours for the taking, if we can.”

“Alright, I’ll get the weapons mods switched out
before we leave.”

“And send a courier,” Brayden added, “with all the
information we have on Tieor and these walkers to the nearest Star Force
colony.”

Traven turned around, already halfway out the door.
“You think they’ll intervene?”

“No, we’re too far out for them to worry about. But
there’s not supposed to be any Skarron influence in this region whatsoever, and
I doubt they just sell their toys to the highest bidder. I don’t know what’s
going on, but anything Skarron-related Star Force needs to have the
intel
on, especially if this is somehow connected to a push
into this region.”

“I hope not, or we’re out of a job.”

“We move when the lines do,” Brayden reminded him.
“Get the message sent and our ships loaded, preferably within the day.”

BOOK: Star Force: Marauders (SF63)
5.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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