Star Force: Marauders (SF63) (7 page)

BOOK: Star Force: Marauders (SF63)
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“Got another aft.”

“Three starboard fore.”

Mason waited a moment, then the pilot finally added,
“Someone’s coming up to the ship, heading to the main bay doors.”

“Lower them, but stay out of sight inside. I need a
team topside.”

“On it,”
Ray’so’mal
said.

“Le’han’trel, take the bay team. I’m flanking.”

“Copy.”

 

Two
mercs
wearing full armor
minus the helmets, escorted a third individual that wore casual clothes plus a
hip-holstered pistol over to the ship’s lowering ramp as the apparent leader
began speaking rapidly in
Klixet
, making demands for
the crew to come out and them being given access to inspect the cargo, citing
something about a maintenance fee when a flash of blue armor ran out from the
left side and barreled down the ramp.

Le’han’trel
rammed the
merc
on the left in an unarmed tackle before he could bring
his weapon up, in typical Protovic fashion, then as the other two turned and
backed away from the pair and tried to draw their weapons a slightly delayed
pair of blurs followed him out and took them down, but not before the unarmored
Selofan
got a shot off into one of the Marauders.

The chest shield held up, barely, until physical
contact was made and that ripped through what was left of the cheap energy
barrier and the militant was knocked to the ground. The Marauder rolled off
him, grabbing his pistol as he did so, then another Marauder followed him up
and shot the leader with a stun blast of hazy green energy that left him groggy
but still conscious. A second shot solved that problem, then the other
Marauders coming out of the ship helped wrestle the armored
mercs
to the ground and disarm them as a few plasma shots were heard elsewhere around
the bay.

 

Mason was the recipient of those shots, three of which
missed but one hit him in the left pectoral, soaking into his energy shield as
the militant shooting at him from afar turned and ran when he saw two more
armored soldiers following. The Human swore and sprinted after him, ducking into
a side doorway and trying to keep within sight. The pudgy alien was slow, but
he had a head start through unfamiliar terrain.

After two fleeting glances through the confines of the
spaceport Mason lost him, only to see pointing arms from the surrounding crowd
telling him to go left. He didn’t know whether to trust them or not, but he
figured why not and headed off that direction as opposed to just choosing one
at random.

The hallway went through several curves, then quickly
exited onto a city street where a blue plasma streak shot past him and hit a
bystander. Mason visually tracked it back to the source and sprinted off after
the militant again, this time with
clear street
to
work with as the crowds backed away from the weaponsfire.

He might not have been in as good of shape now as he
had been when in Star Force, but he hadn’t lost much of his speed and used it
now to run the bastard down within 20 seconds, not bothering to shoot back
until he got within a couple of meters of the target. A shower of sparks blew
out from the impact point on the militant’s unshielded armor, but apparently the
plasma shot wasn’t enough to get through to the ugly thing’s skin.

Not wanting to try for a head shot, he sprinted up
closer and jabbed the barrel of his rifle into its back, tipping it forward and
tripping it up on its own feet. Mason jumped into the air as it happened and
came down with a stiffened knee on top of the militant, disorienting and
knocking the breath out of him as the ex-commando made the takedown.

He put the muzzle of his plasma rifle in the guy’s
face and held it there, giving him the idea that it would be a good idea to
stay down and stay put. The militant complied and Mason held him in place until
his backup caught up to him, then the Marauders pulled out some easy-snap
restraints and took the guy prisoner.

Mason glanced back the way they’d come, remembering
the bystander that had been shot, then he punched the exposed head of the guy
once for the sloppy shot before hauling him to his feet and dragging him back
to the ship when he refused to walk.

 
 

7

 
 

With the floor of the landing bay secured and the main
doors on the
17
open, the pointy end
of the Valerie eased out of the ship, hovering into the clear and staring down
the handful of people that were still in the bay, some of which were now coming
out of the woodwork knowing that the Marauders were here under contract and
feeling safe enough to have a look around now that the short-lived fireworks
were over.

But they weren’t, and as soon as the Valerie got clear
of the ship by a good dozen meters or so it kicked up its anti-
grav
and gained altitude, picking up the nearby militant
fighter about a mile off as it circled about lazily. That demeanor shifted as
soon as the Marauder got his craft above the retaining walls around the bay and
into view, with it accelerating towards him in a quick curve off its former
heading.

The Valerie’s shields went up, offering more than
enough protection against the plasma weapons of the primitive fighter. The
Valerie itself was armed with plasma, but not all versions were equal and
Jackson knew he could down the fighter with ease. That wasn’t the mission,
however, plus they were over the city right now and he needed to draw it off to
keep from hitting anyone below.

Making it look like he was running, the Marauder
accelerated to the east, holding back from full thrust otherwise he’d outrun
his pursuit. It didn’t take long for both of them to pass over the city’s edge,
for it wasn’t that large, and a few kilometers was all the distance he needed
before the grassy plains took over. As soon as both fighters were in the clear
the Marauder stopped playing impotent and executed a tight, sweeping turn that
the opponent tried to mimic…and failed.

Two full rotations around and the
merc
was on the militant’s tail. He popped a golden ball of plasma against the hull,
confirming that it had no shields as it melted/exploded a small section just
behind the cockpit. The pilot kept the yield on the plasma low and peppered a
few more key spots as the enemy fighter tried to evade, but with the superior
design of the Valerie the Marauder was able to keep with it and, so long as he
was patient, was able to line up all the shots he wanted.

Eventually one of the small probing shots hit the
engines and the fighter dropped from the sky during a loop low to the ground.
He’d waited for that moment to fire the last shot, hoping to knock it down when
it only had about 30 meters of altitude to fall from. The stubby ship hit nose
first, digging a short trench into the grass before the momentum flipped it
over in a somersault that crunched various edges in, like the fighter was being
punched into a wad of metal, but no explosions resulted and the craft finally
came to a rest amidst some small brush fires, more or less intact.

“Bird is down,” the pilot reported. “Need a recovery
team
asap
.”

Jackson brought the Valerie into a low hover and
drifted it around a square patrol pattern as he waited, looking to see if the
pilot would come out or not, as well as to keep anyone else from venturing out
to the crash site from the city or the tiny dwellings nearby.

Too easy.

 

Two weeks later Mason was on the perimeter of the
militant stronghold with two other former commandos, neither of which he’d
served with previously in Star Force, but the way they trained their people
made it easy for them to link up without any prior knowledge of each other.
These two were both Human, with Frank having been Axius and
Zaeb
mainline. The pair had been with Mason on numerous missions, mostly those that
required a bit more muscle than usual, and he liked keeping them close, for as
a trio they were virtually impossible to stop.

Frank carried an auxiliary shield generator in a
backpack, while
Zaeb
and Mason were packing extra
weapons. No explosives, for they wanted a clean strike, and their plasma rifles
were more than adequate to burn through any doors that needed removing.

The trio of ex-commandos moved along a ditch,
splashing through the bit of mud in the center in the dead of night and moving
up to a bridge that held a guard station. The depression was deep enough to cover
them from view and the station was on the exterior side of the trench, focused
on incoming traffic without any windows to the inside. Mason had checked on
that from afar during the reconnaissance run the previous day, for ever since
the Marauders had started picking off the scattered militants across the planet
they’d begun retreating here and turtling up.

Not concerned with the sounds of their footfalls, the
trio ran through the ditch along a now empty grazing field. No one was out and
about the exterior perimeter, and even if they were it would have been on the
other side of the fence that tracked the inside of the little-used waterway.
They needed to get to target quickly, and the longer they lingered the better
the chance of someone spotting them out of pure luck, hence the running.

Most of the base defenses were well inside the
perimeter, waiting for someone to cross the bridge or come over the fence and
through the fields by foot. Taking the guard station would do little to hamper
the defenses, in fact, it was basically a decoy setup, for if anyone hit it the
rest of the base would immediately know and go on alert. That made it a
sacrificial lure designed to pull the Marauders in, but Mason was going to take
it anyway.

He was in the lead as they came up on the bridge, then
stopped short of one of the two support beams that came up out of the dirt to
hold up the short structure. Pulling his plasma rifle out he hesitated for a
moment, letting the other two catch up from the few steps behind him that they’d
been running to avoid a lucky shot from taking out all three. He pointed up the
side of the ditch, with Frank jumping into the lead and scaling it on all
fours.

When he got to the top he pulled out a pistol and
moved up to the base of the structure, looking around as the other two climbed
up more slowly using just their legs and a balancing hand. There were no lights
on this side, save for what was on the bridge, and they didn’t shine on
anything other than the road. The ambient glow brightened the area a bit, but
the sky was hazy and the trio appeared as nothing more than weak shadows as
they circling around and came in the guard station’s front side.

Frank sprinted across the opening, firing a plasma
shot through one of the windows with it blowing apart the glass and turning it
into shrapnel that bounced off the militants’ armor, startling them out of
their relaxed poses as they drew their weapons to try and target the enemy as
he shot from left to right across their view.

With their attention drawn that way Mason stepped out
on the left and held position, firing multiple blasts from his rifle into the
pair of guards before they had a chance to readjust their aim. His shots were
precise, and he nailed one of them with three hits to the abdomen, burning
through the armor and hitting flesh. That militant went down, but Mason had to
duck below the wall and out of the wide window as the other shot towards him,
holding his ground for a moment while the doorway into the second room of the
station opened up and more guards flooded out.

Mason rolled to his left, making room for
Zaeb
to crawl up next to him, then when Frank came back
into view on the other side and drew a flurry of plasma lances through the
opposite set of windows, the pair popped up and scattered the militants as they
fired into the group of 6.

Frank didn’t stop to snipe, rather heading directly
for the
doorless
entryway and barreling inside. The
auxiliary shield generator deployed around him, cutting off his own return fire
while creating a bubble-shield that had been scaled down to minimum distance.
It absorbed the hailstorm of blue streaks all the way up to the group, where
Frank jumped into their midst and went at them hand to hand.

Mason and
Zaeb
moved in
then, firing through the window and knocking down the militants with clean
shots while their opponents were distracted. Their armor gave them longevity,
but the three Marauders knew what they were doing and cut them down so fast it
seemed like they hadn’t been wearing any at all.

“Clear,” Frank reported after ducking into the back
room.

Mason picked up two of their weapons and tossed them
behind a counter to start making a pile as
Zaeb
dragged the bodies outside. They didn’t have time to take prisoners, and the
pair that weren’t dead were soon going to be from their wounds, so Mason didn’t
pay any attention to them other than to keep them away from their weapons while
Frank began moving a desk aside and exposing a panel on the floor that the dumb
militants hadn’t even realized was there.

The Marauder shot the attachments off in lieu of the
tools to remove them that he didn’t have, then he pried the panel up with his
armored fingers, exposing the maintenance walkway that traveled all the way
into the facility along with the power and sewage lines…directly under the
defenses the militants had set up on the exterior.

Mason
commed
the others and
the trio held the guard station until they arrived, coming up the road in a
tank of their own and parking it just on the outside of the bridge. It was wheeled,
for the design was far cheaper and more useful for the Marauders than buying
the anti-
grav
variety, though they did have a few of
them in their inventory for special occasions. This one was preceding a line of
infantry equipped in the same
Reen
-manufactured
armor, all of whom clustered inside the guard station and waited to see if the
militants would come out to them.

They didn’t, sitting back behind their turrets and in
their tanks waiting for the Marauders to come to them where they were strongest.
Mason didn’t intend for their tank to be used yet, for it was just a visual
distraction at this point, but eventually they’d need it to deal with the
militant versions, which were little more than dangerous toys in comparison.

The 18 other infantry he took with him down into the
maintenance walkway, which was barely wide enough for one of them to slip
through with all the piping and technical accoutrements dangling in the way.
Moving single file they jogged as best they could through it for more than 3 kilometers
before they got to where the schematics said was the junction with the
outermost buildings in the facility.

They didn’t come up there, but rather moved further
through the network of underground tunnels until they came to the nexus point
that branched off in three directions. They split up there and set a countdown
timer, giving them all 6 minutes to get in position. Mason took Frank and
Zaeb
with him, while Le’han’trel led one of the other
teams. The Protovic had the hardest assignment in this assault, that being
hitting the barracks, or rather what the militants had converted into one.

Mason’s trio had picked up Navo and Willis, and the
five of them moved through the tunnel until they came up underneath another
sealed panel. They waited until the countdown expired, then blew the panel
latches off with plasma fire before pushing the stubborn thing up a few inches,
finding that there was something on top of it.

Using his well-trained muscle, Mason wedged himself
between it and Frank’s backpack, stepping on the fellow Marauder to use him as
a stool and prying the panel up enough to get an arm out, seeing nothing but
boxes around him.

He pushed his head and torso through, then used the
rim of the depression for the leverage he needed and dumped whatever was on top
of him aside, allowing him to crawl out and get his weapon back from below as
Navo handed it to him coming up. Mason took it and pushed another box stack to
the side, making walking room and moving through a forest of supplies until
they got into the clear, with no one else in what appeared to be a storage
room.

He waited until the other four caught up, then he blew
apart the lock on the door and the squad got moving through the facility
enroute
to one of the fortified buildings they’d scouted
from afar earlier. They had to cross out into the open once, hopping from
building to building whereas most of the other structures were all
interconnected, but they did so fast enough either not to get noticed or to
draw any return fire as they busted their way into a populated building that
held a number of prisoners/slaves draw from the local population.

There were only two guards on them, which were taken
down quickly enough, but by that time the cat was out of the bag and the
militants knew they had infiltrators in the base. Not taking any chances, Mason
and the others stunned every unarmored person they came across, whether they be
militant or not, intending to sort it out later and to keep those they were
here to rescue from running about wildly and getting shot in the crossfire.

One pair they found in an isolated room appeared to be
mating, and as Mason stunned them both he cursed the stupidity of it. The alarm
had already gone up, and this idiot was busy getting laid. He didn’t know if
the other was a victim or not, but the one had half a militant uniform on and
Mason didn’t really want to look any closer. He grabbed the rifle from nearby
and carried it with him out of the room, disposing of it by chucking it behind
a potted plant that had since died due to lack of watering.

He and the others worked their way through the large
building, finding only one more guard stationed at the opposite entrance. After
taking him down with ease, they pulled back and moved to an adjacent building
through a connective walkway, hearing the first sounds of a distant firefight
that should have been Jarod’s team.

BOOK: Star Force: Marauders (SF63)
3.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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