Star Force: Resistance (SF75) (2 page)

But taking out some of their capability left them to
limp around to be destroyed layer, for they weren’t leaving the system in such
a state unless they wanted to spend years in transit to the closest star
system. With her goal being just that, she had numerous drones firing in
coordination that a crew of pilots couldn’t handle as well, for all the ships
were the pieces of one player, that being Sara, in this computerized hive mind
that she was working through.

But there were so many lizard ships now that she was
overwhelmed, losing a few drones here and there to cruiser fire or collisions,
but unable to stop the wellspring and having it force forward into
Kiran’s
lines. Rather than let it get to them, both
trailblazers did what they had to do…collapse their widespread lines down into
solidified groups that could chew through enemy ships. Let them get spread out
and the lizards would do the same to them, tech advantage or no.

But that also meant sections of the massive lizard
fleet that was continuing to roll in were left to do as they pleased. Many
pressed the attack, but some sections of it started to form a wall in space
that well over half an hour later shielded for a different group of jumpships
to come in. These carried troops and supplies, pooling in a series of groups
with escorts and then making microjumps elsewhere into the system while Sara
and
Kiran
were still fighting the warships and just
trying to knock them down as fast as they could while they were still somewhat unorganized.

The first reinforcement convoy jumped into planetary
orbit behind its wedge of cruisers and empty jumpships that just rammed the
Star Force lines, forcing blunt stops and running interference while the
support ships flew past and raced towards low orbit and the range where the
planetary anti-orbit guns could cover them. Sara and
Kiran
were out of the loop on this behind far too many seconds of lag, but the mage
in command of the orbital defense dispatched small groups of ships to take down
some of the reinforcements while the rest were left dealing with the attacking
warships.

A swarm of blocky drones shot after the blockade
runners far faster than the lizard ships could move, binary drives or not, and
came up behind them to open fire where the lizards own planetary weapons
couldn’t target them. Chewing into their ships from behind with a ravenous
appetite, the drones followed the lizard ships down into the atmosphere, dropping
more of them as they progressed down the line as a few huge pink phaser blasts
leapt up at them. A few drones got hit and were lost, but the rest stayed
tucked in with their prey and continued to kill them up until the point where
the lizard ships scattered, forcing the drones to choose who to chase.

But at that point the mage ordered them to hold fire
and simply follow the ships at extremely close range to avoid the defense
batteries. If they shot the lizard ships down they’d be exposed, and the mage
wanted them to get to ground as well. The lizard cities couldn’t admit their
own ships with the drones tucked in, so they had a problem to deal with.

When the split happened a lot of the transports got
away, but the drones stayed with some and found blind spots in the terrain
where the anti-orbital guns couldn’t hit them. Stashing them away there for
future use, the mage continued to fight the short-lived battle in orbit only to
have another group with escorts coming in.

There were so many lizard ships in the system, both at
the star and coming in to the planet, that Star Force couldn’t stop them all.
They were destroying them left and right, and taking a beating as they did it,
but hundreds and then thousands of ships made it down to the planet in an
anti-like flow as the never-ending convoy kept pouring more ships into the
system with no end in sight.

2

February 26, 2933

Gvaris
System (lizard
territory)

Nephasil

Harris-739221 stood atop a lizard building on the
outskirts of one of their cities that Star Force had invaded some 4 days ago.
They’d met up with heavy resistance but had succeeded in claiming a slice of
the southeast quadrant, essentially a crescent moon with the middle starting to
widen out and push further in. The still smoking remains of the city’s single
anti-orbital battery lay to the northwest, having fallen victim to the costly orbital
bombardment that had seen many drones get junked cutting the invasion force a
blind spot to land troops inside. Now it was up to them to take out the rest of
the planet from the ground.

The ranger had been in 3 large campaigns prior to this
one, but none of them had seen fighting like this. Even in this city alone
there were lizards pouring in from reinforcement lines as other cities shifted
their resources to fight here rather than wait for the invaders to get to them.
Six cities lay wasted behind them, with this one and two others currently under
Star Force attack with hundreds more across the planet for them to get through,
but right now that wasn’t a concern.

From his vantage point up top, while the rest of his
unit were taking a quick nap below in a prefab firebase that they’d actually
set up inside a gutted lizard building for the visual cover, he could see the
mech battles taking place around the city. The lizards were fighting through
the interior but also trying to flank the invaders, which was why they’d
attacked on a wide swath. It would give them a ‘safe’ zone in the middle that
they could fall back to if necessary, but the mechs were determined to keep the
tank swarms and fighters at bay. He could see several of the
Porcupine
-class quadruped mechs
patrolling behind the front lines daring the lizard fighters to come within
range, but the suicidal pilots were backing off at the moment, with the once
barren countryside getting a lot of yellow/tan metallic boulders added to the
natural pale pink ones.

With the number of porcupines that they had in play,
Harris knew they’d be safe from all but the largest of the wisp swarms. Those
had been present when they’d initially attacked the city, but the perimeter had
been an easy approach in that there were no boundary walls. Typically lizard
cities didn’t have them, for they were constantly growing and pushing out their
borders, but they did have defense turrets and towers that a group of heavy
walkers had to take down from range. Two
Rafael
-class
walkers, the largest that Star Force produced, had knocked out the visible
turrets from afar and were now parked out behind them in what was essentially
the middle of the invasion zone. They were too big to enter the city, unless
you wanted to squash buildings while walking over them, but they did a
remarkable job of keeping enemy tanks away through intimidation alone.

The current engagements were happening further around
the curve of the city where their firing lines did not connect. Harris could
see a lot going on, and was taking a moment to check out what the battlemap was
telling him before he got back into the action. This city looked like it was
going to take weeks to conquer, based on the number of reinforcements that were
pouring in, but Star Force was grinding its way forward and he had to take rest
sooner or later. He’d spent an 18 hour stint fighting before coming here to
grab some food and rest rather than redeploying back to a safer Star Force
ground base. Many others were doing the same, and now that he was up he wanted
to take stock of the larger picture before he got consumed in hand to hand
fighting alongside the Commandos and Knights while higher ranking Archons pressed
forward sniffing out traps that could collapse buildings down on top of you.

His helmet had a magnification function built into the
cameras hidden within the hard exterior. There was no faceplate on this
version, relaying entirely on a holographic HUD inside to allow him to see.
Some of the old models were still used but Harris, like most other Archons,
preferred not to have a weaker section of armor covering his eyes. The plate
hovering just in front of his face was the thickest on his body and would allow
him to take several direct blasts without penetrating. The fact that he looked
like a robot from the outside didn’t bother him, for most of the Commandos with
him were likewise wearing similar ‘faceless’ helmets.

With the zoom function expanding out, he was watching
one
Starbright
-class
mech battle with a dozen or so lizard tanks when he noticed a dark cloud in the
distance behind them. At first he thought it was a storm wall approaching, for
this planet regularly had wet weather, which was odd considering the plant-less,
rocky terrain. Both lizard and Star Force aerial fighters could navigate
through clouds and rain well enough, but lightning strikes were going to make
things tricky for them and he wondered if the lizards weren’t going to try and
make a play in the storm when it got here.

Harris moved his line of sight forward as far as he
could until the edge of the city eclipsed his view. The mech battles were
continuing beyond his line of sight, but it looked like there were groups of
tanks trying to rush past them and dive into the city streets behind Star Force
lines in an attempt to the flank the ground troops within. He saw one Keema
streak mildly disrupt the skyline before melting/exploding one of the tanks in
a single strike, followed by four more shots in the next 5 seconds coming from
one of the rafaels that ended their little flanking run before they could make
the buildings.

The lizards had pushed too far and paid the price for
it, but the fact that they were even trying showed how desperate they were.
No…desperate wasn’t the right word. They had a different feel to them right
now, aggressive for sure, and reckless to a fault, but he got the sense that
something else was in play. He zoomed out his battlemap to cover the distance
mech fights and saw a huge army of tanks behind those within his line of sight,
on the order of several thousand all trying to cut in on the edge of the
crescent and get behind the troop positions within the city.

Just then a warning beacon registered in his HUD
calling everyone to battle, including those on sleep cycles. Harris was already
up so he didn’t need to do anything yet, merely waiting on orders for where his
unit was meant to go, but wondering what the urgency was beyond the tanks, he
expanded his battlemap out to cover the entire city looking for the source of
the warning.

He found not one, but six beacon markers indicating
extreme threats. Five marked reinforcement lines coming in from neighboring
cities on an order of magnitude far beyond what they’d been getting. No doubt a
result of the new arrivals that had been pouring down from orbit with naval unable
to stop most of them from getting to ground. He’d wondered when those troops
would come into play, and unfortunately it looked like they were going to dump
them on his position rather than spreading them out piecemeal across the
planet.

“Shit,” he said, hoping Star Force was sending
reinforcements as well, for there was no way they could hold out against that
many…then he noticed the sixth beacon’s location and snapped his head back
towards the approaching zoom and engaged maximum zoom, seeing that it was
closing on them rapidly. The dark ‘cloud’ was now resolved down to tiny
granules of moving objects, which his battlemap was tagging as lizard wisps.

Harris didn’t have anything to say to that, with the
approaching doom clamping down on any verbal retort. There were so many wisps
that his battlemap couldn’t get an accurate count, and they were all headed
straight here.

The porcupines began moving a few seconds later,
increasing their spacing while other mechs moved in to flank them. It took less
than half a minute after that before Harris’s orders came in, with a waypoint
directing him and his unit down into the substructure of the city and off the
streets.

The ranger pulled back his zoom and turned away from
the approaching wisp storm, sliding off the edge of the roof and dropping down
to the alley three stories below where he joined his Commandos coming out and
racing for one of the entrances to the
undercity
and
away from the aerial attack about to hammer them.

Harris waited for the last of his men to come out,
then followed up the rear along with a pair of Knights as he heard the
porcupines’ array of
sammies
begin to fire off so
fast he couldn’t count the number. By the time he ducked into the building
entrance that would lead them down and out of sight, the sound of the phaser
storm began to build to monstrous levels and he was very glad he wasn’t out
there in a mech right now, though when those ground troops got here he didn’t
expect to be much better off.

Three days
later…

“What have you got?”
Jyra
asked, walking in with Mace and Leo as Brandon was leaning over a holographic
table in their small private chamber onboard trailblazer Sara’s command ship.

“Have a look,” he said, zooming out to a regional map
of the planet’s surface where Star Force still held positions. They’d been
forced back into three captured cities and two defense outposts they’d
constructed of their own, though those were being heavily engaged by the lizard
ground troops.

Jyra
looked at the basic
map, noting a few small updates but seeing nothing of consequence…as far as a
mission for them was concerned. Star Force was getting its ass kicked, having
to give up ground to avoid being obliterated while a single key strongpoint was
being constructed. Right now it lay at the center of their territory inside a
captured lizard city. That had seemed odd to
Jyra
,
for Star Force usually preferred to construct its own digs, but for whatever
the reason the trailblazers had chosen to set up there and were coordinating
all of the retreats to buy time to layer it with tech from the fleet in orbit
that was barely hanging on to an overhead slot.

It was a turtling up strategy that was daring the
lizards to hit them and suffer the consequences, but it also meant that the
enemy could now land reinforcements on the far side of the planet without
contest and move them across land or air given enough time. If they tried
anything closer they’d be harassed or shot down, and even now there were some
naval groups out elsewhere around the planet and system doing just that to the
lizards, but the bulk was with the command ship
Jyra
was on that was protecting the ground troops and feeding them supplies. Without
them providing cover the lizards could kamikaze ram their cruisers into the
captured cities and it’d be bye
bye
ground troops.

“What am I looking at?”
Jyra
asked.

“A nightmare situation,” Brandon said, referencing the
entire ground campaign, “but not one without holes to exploit. We can’t do
anything about the supplies coming down from orbit, and blowing up a few on the
ground won’t do much good, but these lizard cities are still actively producing
material and warm bodies to throw at us. If we knock down even one wellspring
it could make a sizeable difference over the months to come when you do the
math.”

“I think ‘negligible’ is the term you’re looking for,”
Leo countered.

“We’re not going to win the war on our own,” Mace
agreed with Brandon, “but we can save our guys some trouble by taking out
factories and avoiding them having to face off against the produce later on.
Almost impossible to measure something like that, but it’ll have a real effect
so long as we don’t eventually concede the planet and withdraw.”

Jyra
raised an eyebrow. “Is
that actually being considered?”

Brandon shook his head. “I don’t know, but unless the
trailblazers can pull some magic on a scale I’ve never heard of, there’s no way
we can win this without a lot of reinforcements. Even then this is going to be
a bitch on the ground. We could be looking at a decade-long planetary
engagement.”

“Or worse,” Leo added.

“So one factory out of commission
adds
up to a lot of stuff not being produced over that timespan,” Brandon summed up.

“Alright then. Where do you want us to go?” Mace
asked.

Brandon pointed to one city in particular, then looked
at the other three Arc Commandos for their reactions.

“Behind enemy lines?”
Jyra
spoke out what the other two were thinking.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Brandon offered.

“This,” Mace said, pointing into the hologram of the
city that spanned more than a 60 mile radius, “would be a first. Our troops
only took down a tiny slice of the exterior. That means it’s still lizard
central and it’s where they’re routing the reinforcements through.”

“Part of the reinforcements, and it’s not the front
line anymore thanks to the ass kicking we’re getting down there. That means it
won’t be heavily defended. They’re throwing everything at our troops, not
putting up defenses in the rear.”

Leo reached over to the controls, nudging Brandon
aside, and zoomed in on the city in question. He brought up the formerly Star
Force section of it and jabbed a finger at the new construction zones popping
up.

“They’re rebuilding the turret defense.”

“Which will take time. We’ve got a window of
opportunity to hit them where they’re not expecting us to. If we wait it
disappears.”

“Most of their troops are moving through,” Mace
commented, thinking hard. “They’re not hunkered down in defensive slots, which
is odd if they were worried about counterattack, especially with their shield
emitters being
slagged
.”