Star Force: Resistance (SF75) (3 page)

“They’re not even thinking about a counterattack,”
Brandon emphasized.

“How much damage could we do?”
Jyra
asked.

Brandon zoomed in again, showing several markers he’d
placed earlier on key facilities, including the bigger defense turrets near the
city center.

“We can’t touch these, they’re too well defended. But
these,” he said, bringing up 19 different locations spread across the entirety
of the city, “I think are doable.”

“All of them?”

“No, unfortunately. We can’t carry enough explosives
for more than two, I’d guess. And unless we want to get really bold and put
them on long timers, we can’t come and go several times to get them all loaded
up. If we can sneak down to the planet and patiently work our way in, I think
we’ve got a shot at doing this once. More than that, at this location anyway,
would be pushing it.”

“And you think this isn’t pushing it already?” Leo
asked.

“If we stay in the shadows no. The question is whether
we’re sneaky enough.”

“If we’re exposed we’re as good as dead,” Mace
commented.

“We can go underground as a backup. Hide out and make
them chase us, so it’s not an instant death fail.”

“That’s so reassuring,” Leo mumbled.

“If you want to nix it, just say so. We can find
somewhere else to pitch in.”

“No, you’re right,”
Jyra
said, looking at the map. “This will matter if we can pull it off. Putting us
four on defensive engagements doesn’t gain much. We need to go on the offense
and hit something big.”

“Unfortunately the ‘big’ stuff is out of our reach,”
Leo argued, looking back at Brandon. “What’s our exit strategy…other than
running and hiding?”

“Arrange an
evac
point
outside the city and sneak back out.”

“After we blow it?”

“We can set short timers, I just don’t want to leave
the bombs where they can be found over the course of time.”

“Bombs as in what?”

Brandon frowned. “Nothing pretty this time. Just what
we can carry in our packs along with survival gear for a few weeks.”

“So not much then,” Mace summed up.

“We’ll have to be creative in the placement.”

Jyra
looked at Mace, with
both of them in agreement, then she glanced at Leo and gave him a mental ‘
boink
’ sound and question mark in a telepathic burst.

“This is dumb,” he said plainly, “which is why the
lizards wouldn’t see it coming. If we can stay dark it’s doable, otherwise
we’re toast. I’m game if you have a really good plan.”

“I do, but I haven’t cleared it yet. Needed you guys
onboard first.”

“We are,” Leo confirmed. “Call it in.”

Brandon walked away from the holo table to a pedestal
on the other side of the small room, putting his back to his team as he placed
a bare hand on it, linking into the telepathic device interface and connecting
to the ship’s nexus where the trailblazer was. Through it they had a brief
conversation even as she was guiding ships in orbit and coordinating the
fighting retreat on the ground. Alpha 9 was the only Arc Commando team involved
in this campaign and she’d been saving them for special missions, letting them
choose when and where to get involved, but even Brandon wasn’t sure she would
go for this one.

He sensed some hesitation when he had completed his
proposal, but within a few seconds he got confirmation along with an added
wrinkle to the plan to give them some better insertion cover. The Arc Commando
withdrew his hand from the pedestal, severing the connection to the
computerized hive mind that was organizing this invasion, and turned to his
three peers.

“We’re approved and on the clock. 33 minutes to get
geared up and in position. Our ride is going to be a bit more flamboyant than I
had planned.”

3

The command ship moved down into low orbit as far as
it could without endangering itself from the anti-orbital batteries, though
some of them were painting its shields will diffuse blasts that were exceeding
their effective range. While they did so a portion of the shield was lowered
while a few railgun-equipped drones flew down in the shadow of the ship then
flanked it,
loosing
their slugs at the lizard cities
without the ability to aim properly given the distance, though hitting their
miles-wide shield plates wasn’t going to be an issue.

When the first few fell to ground the anti-air
batteries hit them, but couldn’t stop them. Slightly deformed from the light
strikes they rammed into the flat shield discs over top the cities and began
draining them of power…but at a rate far too low to be effective on a
planet-wide assault, else the invasion force would have come equipped with far
more. Lizard shields had upgraded to the degree where physical impact didn’t
drain them as much as it once had, ironically giving them more of a defense
again the kamikaze attacks they themselves employed regularly.

The railgun slugs were basically that, though on a much
smaller scale. The anti-orbital batteries couldn’t track and hit them, given
the speed at which they were falling, otherwise they never would have made it
to ground. After a couple minutes of bombardment the command ship joined in,
save for the fact that it didn’t have any rail guns.

What it fired down towards the planet were much larger
objects, but at the same insane speeds. Essentially large asteroids, these
slugs would do considerably more damage when they hit…but they weren’t aimed at
the cities, rather a stretch of uninhabited land in between where they came
crashing down with huge craters being carved out from the impacts and the
resulting dust clouds filling the air even as a rainstorm was wetting the
ground.

All together the command ship sent down 134 objects, with
the drones’ railgun bombardment continuing a few minutes more before cancelling
the attack well prior to the massive shields being penetrated. The ship and its
escorts retreated back up to its holding orbit, with the anti-orbital guns ceasing
their likewise ineffective attack, leaving all quiet for the moment at the attack
sites while the ground battles continued to occur in 5 locations to the east.

Where the dust cloud was being chewed into by the
rain, what remained of the asteroids were shielded from lizard view being
located at the base of the newly formed craters. The giant ‘rocks’ had held
together fairly well, with the exterior having been deformed by the impact,
though the shields protecting it had done well to soften the blow before they
breached and the material took the rest of the hit. But inside those
house-sized rocks were hollow pockets with IDF protecting the contents. So long
as the shells didn’t breach or the fields overload, the
Spark
-class drones inside didn’t feel a thing in the crashes, soon
coming online when the cases were explosively released opening up the contents
to the falling rain.

With controllers in orbit handling them, the little
anti-
grav
spheres lifted up out of their protective
cocoons having bypassed the planetary defenses and were now located behind
enemy lines a bit. Each of the 134 craters were spaced out so none ran the risk
of hitting each other on impact for they were totally unguided on reentry, so
each of the little groups of sparks began to flow out of the craters like a
line of ants heading towards mutual rendezvous points where they would form up
into 6 different columns, traveling overland rapidly towards the flank of the
lizard armies that were continuing to push Star Force’s troops backwards.

But these sparks weren’t headed for the main battle,
rather they were headed for the lines of reinforcements feeding them, intent on
ambushing those overland convoys for while a lot were being moved in vehicles
there were so many lizard infantry units in play that they were approaching on
foot from the nearest cities. Those were exposed while the bulk of the wisp
swarms were well ahead playing tag with the Star Force anti-air defenses.

Whether they stayed there or redeployed to counter the
sparks wasn’t an issue. Getting those units into the field at the position they
did was key, for it was outside the ‘safe’ corridor that Star Force had blown
into the anti-orbital defenses and where they weren’t expecting anything
containing cargo or troops to come down in. If the sparks were all destroyed by
the wisps before they could get to the infantry columns then so be it, for that
would give the defenders a much needed break from the persistent air attacks
and an opening to counterattack, briefly, on the ground. Either way it was of
strategic value, however costly in terms of equipment and ammunition. They
couldn’t employ the same tactic again, not from this command ship anyway, for
Sara had sent down their full complement of drop pods.

As the sparks left their one-way transports behind the
interiors of the empty shells began to fill up with rain water, a few inches at
least by the time Alpha 9 decided it was time to get moving. They’d come down
inside one of the pods, huddled up in a smaller cocoon with a backup IDF in
case the main one failed. It hadn’t, and now the four man Arc Commando team was
on the planet behind enemy lines in the middle of nowhere, hopefully undetected
and going to stay that way.

Inside the hollow sphere where a few sparks had ridden
were several other packages, from which four speeder bikes were removed and
loaded up with cargo canisters where applicable.
Jyra
climbed onto her floating steed with extra fuel packs and supplies stashed
around the seat with just enough room for her to slide her legs over, then she
pulled a special sleeve that covered the front of the bike up over her head and
attached it to the rear giving her the aerodynamic look of a fat needle.

The other three did likewise, obscuring each other
from view save for a tiny spec of a camera on the nose of the bikes that fed
into their HUDs. Through that they could see ahead, but not behind or to the
sides. That wasn’t the best feeling in the world, but
Jyra
knew it was a necessity as she hit the interior button that activated the cloaking
sheath. Her bike vanished from view, replaced with a black blot that no light
was being emitted or reflected from. The other three did likewise, turning into
phantoms that rose up into the rain under the dark of night undetectable to
lizard sensors or eyes. Had they come in the daylight the black blurs would be
noticeable, but at night it was almost impossible to tell dim light from
nothing at all so long as the concealed bikes didn’t pass in front of a light
source.

It wasn’t a
scifi
‘cloaking
field’ in the traditional sense, but it would allow the Arc Commandos to move
around the countryside unnoticed so long as their ruse had worked and no one
was nearby to pay attention to the crash site…with the cloud cover and rain
being an added bonus that virtually insured they’d go undetected.

They still had half the night to work with, but they
couldn’t take a straight line approach to their destination city. The four of
them hovered out of the drop pod in sequence then took off into the night
navigating solely by telepathy to keep from bumping into one another, for the
dark shadows the bikes made in the rain were almost indistinguishable from the
rest of the night even when they were directly in front of you.

That meant the four of them had to stay close together
given their limited Ikrid range, with
Jyra’s
being
the weakest. They kept her in the middle of their tri-point formation, with
Brandon’s speeder ahead. She could see a bit of his distortion wake as his
canopy busted through the raindrops in her nightvision, but he was too far away
to see with her Pefbar, though every now and then she could catch a glimpse of
the ground beneath her as they skimmed a ridge. There were minimum altitude
sensors underneath the bikes that would keep them from dropping too low, but in
order to keep from bouncing up and down constantly they were flying in as
straight of a line as possible.

All she had to do was follow Brandon, for it was his
job to navigate as best he could without good vision or lateral sensors, and he
had them traveling at considerable speed. They could always increase altitude,
for the bikes had no maximum, but the more they could hug the terrain the
better they all felt, so they were playing it cagy and a bit reckless at the
same time.

But she trusted their team leader and just did her
part to keep up. The few times he eased out of her Ikrid range Mace and Leo
were beside her to orient off of. They had greater range and didn’t lose track
of him, allowing her to creep back up to the point where she could sense his
presence, though his bike was still thoroughly a blank spot as far as her
nightvision was concerned.

As far as navigating to their destination they had no
help there. The bike’s navigation systems could pick up the orbital signals
from the warships to give them a read-only link to the battlemap, but those
systems were powered down when underneath the stealth sheath, for it would
block all incoming signals. That meant Brandon had to play it by ear and
guestimate their heading and distance traveled up until he found some
convenient terrain and they stopped within a steep canyon.

By that time they were out of the rainstorm and the
first hint of light began to illuminate the western horizon, with them parking
their bikes between rock formations where they’d be all but impossible to see.
They kept their cloaking sheaths on, making only a visible inspection from
directly above possible of spotting the black dots and hopefully they would be
in shadow once the sun rose, but the four Arc Commandos slid out from underneath
their rides and had a look around the area, finding an elevated position from
which to get their bearings.

Jyra
crawled up
top
a small mount next to the other four as the sky began
to brighten to hazy blue, barely enough to make out the first bits of sight
without their nightvision, but the distant lizard cities were easy enough to
make out, for their buildings rose up well above the terrain. There were three
within easy viewing and a scattering of others whose tips were just poking
above the horizon. None of them were their target, meaning they were going to
have to lay low throughout the day and travel another leg over the next night,
but first they needed an accurate vector.

Jyra
saw a new waypoint
uploaded onto her HUD from Brandon’s helmet and synced with the battlemap being
transmitted from orbit, but per their sneaking orders they’d set their own
transmitters to stay silent aside from a very weak signal that would only
register within a few dozen meters. That may have been a bit paranoid considering
their
comm
signals were already camouflaged, but with
the ever increasing level of lizard tech they didn’t want to take any chances.

“Looks like we’re clear,” Leo commented, the first
words any of them had spoken all night long.

“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Brandon said,
continuing to have a look around. “I don’t think the lizards have any reason
for being out here on foot, but I don’t want to take the chance of a stray ship
spotting us. If anyone sees a nice camping spot, don’t keep it to yourself.”

“I’ve got a ledge to the south,” Mace commented.
“Plenty of boulders to find some shady spots.”

“I suppose a cave is too much to ask for?”
Jyra
said, looking around with the others in her
nightvision.

“How long do we have to look?” Leo asked.

“About 5 minutes.”

“Couldn’t you have put us down sooner?” Mace
complained.

“
Woulda
,
coulda
,
shoulda
…it’s a moot point now.”

“I’ll take the north,”
Jyra
said, crawling over the top and sliding down the rocky hillside there.

“South,” Leo said, taking off the opposite direction
and leaving the other two the remaining cardinal points. They scrambled around
on the ground, running once they were below vision height of the surrounding
area, and looking for the best cover they could find, hoping they wouldn’t have
to be stuck in a square meter or two for the next 19 hours.

Mace won out in the scavenger hunt, finding a deep
overhang that was essentially a wall-less cave on three sides. It wasn’t big
enough to bring all their bikes under, but they did head back to them and
retrieve bits of equipment that they then hiked a short distance and out of
sight of the bikes to dump underneath the overhang as the sun finally broke
over the horizon.

“Good one, Mace,”
Jyra
said
as she pulled off her helmet and tasted the slightly pungent air that had
oxygen levels higher than Star Force standard. “Who wants first watch?”

“I will,” Brandon offered. “Get your digs set up and
chill. No workouts, unfortunately.”

“At least we can get out of our armor,” Leo said,
pulling his helmet off as
Jyra
began unpacking their
portable tents.

“No, use the big one,” Brandon told her.

“Will it fit?”

“I think so. Try anyway, we’ve got plenty of time to
kill.”

Jyra
shrugged and pulled out
the larger unit as Leo smoothed off the ground as much as possible, kicking
some small rocks out of the way before she deployed the canister and
they
all stepped back from the perimeter but still stayed under
the aerial cover of the ledge. The pale pink rocks would stand out in stark
contrast to their pitch black armor, for they’d chosen that color for their
nighttime operations in the hasty prep they’d had on the command ship prior to
insertion.