Star Force: Resistance (SF75) (4 page)

The tent rose up and kissed the ceiling, getting
pinned there a few inches from full deployment.

“Close enough?” Mace wondered.

“It’s not rigid,”
Jyra
pointed out.

“Will it still work?” Leo asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Never had to deal with
this before.”

“We don’t need the walls, it’s the stuff inside.”

“Well,”
Jyra
said, pushing
the door flap aside and walking in. “The floor and ceiling are solid, and I
assume the power lines in the walls are either flexible or in the poles.”

“Try it,” Brandon said, tossing her the power pack.

“Please work,” she whispered. “I really want a
shower.”

She slid the small device in then got handed the other
pieces of equipment through the doorway by the others. When she plugged them in
they lit up with power, but it wasn’t until she stepped inside the shower ring
and tapped the button with her armored toe did it come on. She let it scrub the
outer layer of her armor until it did a full circuit up and down, with the few
missing inches of height apparently not affecting it negatively.

“Seems ok,” she said, turning it off and stepping out.

“Something to add to the Nest notes,” Brandon said,
staying outside. “I’m on watch. Get to sleep.”

“How about some cards?” Mace asked.

“After we relieve ourselves,” Leo noted. “I’d prefer
to do that in private, thank you very much.”

“Yeah,”
Jyra
agreed. “Go
ahead. I’ve got second.”

“Are we showering in private too?” Mace wondered.

“Let’s just camp outside and give everyone some alone
time,”
Jyra
suggested. “Though it is weird that the
idea of showering in front of you guys doesn’t bother me, but I really don’t
like taking a dump with you watching.”

“Ditto,” Leo agreed. “Might as well give each other
some space while we can.”

“Let us know when you’re done,” Mace said, walking
back outside and finding a bit of ground to sit on looking out at the ever
increasing sunlight kissing the rocks. A huge shadow was overtop the ledge and
most of the canyon, but he could see the sunlight line on the walls was moving
ever so slowly down.

Jyra
sat down next to him,
with Brandon to the far left still with his helmet on. He’d stay that way until
his watch was over, with the other two letting him keep the look out while
Jyra
leaned back on the ground and stretched out,
literally, after having been cramped up on the speeder for hours. She yawned,
not really tired but thoroughly bored.

“Should have brought a game mod,” she said, sitting back
up and mentally settling in to the process of waiting for nightfall to come
again.

4

February 27, 2933

Gvaris
System (lizard
territory)

Nephasil

Jyra
and her team packed up
their gear just before sunset and crept over to their speeders when the light
finally went down. Throughout the entire day they hadn’t seen or heard so much
as a peep from the lizards, but with their lives hanging on by a thread they
didn’t want to take any chances. When deep night finally reigned they mounted
up and took off on the next leg of their journey, traveling north around a city
then angling northeast in a zigzag between two others before finally finding
some less than suitable terrain to lay low in during the next day.

There they didn’t have the luxury of an overhang, barely
finding enough boulders to hide their bikes in and having to stay in armor
tucked into crevices for most of the day. When night finally fell they took an
hour to set up camp and shower, then they immediately packed back up and headed
off on their bikes towards their destination city.

They got to the perimeter with a few hours left to
spare but didn’t think that would be enough time to accomplish their mission,
so they searched around and actually found a cave to hide in about 20 miles
outside the city. There they waited through the day cycle, sleeping in turns while
one always kept watch with a fair amount of air traffic passing nearby them.
They weren’t disturbed and no wisps or transports did a double pass so the team
assumed they’d gone undetected, then when the day began to wane it was almost
time to get going and make this happen, with
Jyra
watching battlemap updates being transmitted from orbit detailing how the
ground battles were faring.

She wasn’t pulling live vids, for she couldn’t request
additional data with the blackout protocols, but the basis statistics showed
that they were losing, but in a controlled manner. Bleeding the enemy of troops
as they slowly withdrew, but Star Force only had so much ground to give. The
‘had to hold’ points were still secure, but the pressure on them was mounting
and
Jyra
wasn’t sure what the outcome of this one was
going to be unless they got reinforcements…for the enemy’s never-ending stream
was going to wear down their troops eventually, with the lizard body trails
already being visible from orbit.

“Anyone else thinking that we might be a bit too
late?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the cave where she could get decent
reception on her helmet, but just far enough in side that she was still in
shadow.

“Looks that way,” Mace answered. “But if Sara let us
come down here, then I’d guess they don’t see it that way.”

“We’re going to need backup.”

“Might already be on the way.”

“Regardless,” Brandon added, “we haven’t seen this
much resistance on the ground since…well, as long as I can remember.”

“I don’t think the lizards want us severing their
empire’s lifeline,” Leo summed up. “I think we’re in for a whole new level of
spamming here.”

“Not us, if we do our job right,” Brandon corrected.
“Let’s hope their backline is asleep.”

“When do they sleep?”
Jyra
wondered. “And how much?”

“A good question,” Brandon agreed. “Let’s not try and
a find out this trip, okay?”

“Not like I was going to go around interviewing them,”
Jyra
mumbled. “Just wondering how much a slice of day
they miss in snooze zone.”

“Once every three days, give or take,” Leo answered.

Brandon turned his helmet to look at him. “How do you
know that?”

“Recon report.”

“By who?”

“The Queen of Diamonds. She’s pulled a lot of solo
missions behind enemy lines studying them. I’ve been able to get into most of
the reports. Makes for good reading.”

“I didn’t think our codes would work on the
trailblazers’ stuff?”

“She’s not one of them.”

“Scuttlebutt says she is,”
Jyra
disagreed.

“No, she just has some experimental flying armor,”
Mace explained.

“Have you found confirmation of that?” Brandon asked.

“In reports, no. But I have pulled visuals from some
of the battles she’s been in. Those aren’t hard to find.”

“Ok, lizard expert,” Brandon said. “Anything else we
should know before heading in there?”

“They don’t like losing,” Leo said, watching his own
HUD with the realtime battlemap.

“Well they’re going to lose a little to us. Let’s get
packed up,” he said, grabbing a water jug while the others picked up the spare
pieces of equipment that didn’t go in their packs and loaded them up while Leo
took down their tent and did likewise. When they were all set they mounted up
within the cave and eased their way out one by one, hugging low to the terrain
and following Brandon out as he navigated their way through the dark getting
them closer to the city.

The cameras on the tips of the speeders picked up the
aerial traffic easily enough, with ships coming and going constantly from other
cities delivering troops and supplies that would then be sent on ahead to the
front. No infantry convoys were present, however, but there were a lot of
rapidly moving
hovertrucks
coming in, apparently
shuttling the hordes of lizards to this rendezvous point where they could
gather and then approach
en
mass under their own
power.

That meant the four speeders had to be careful when
approaching to choose a vector that didn’t have traffic, but a couple of miles
shy of the outer buildings they stopped their approach and flew low in a wide
circle checking the terrain and keeping off the rocky mounts. Eventually they
found a bit of cover and set down, hiding two of the bikes there and doubling
up on the others. They planned to fly their way over the buildings and through
the streets rather than trying to huff it on foot, but if something went wrong
and they lost their rides they didn’t want to get caught out in the countryside
on foot, for their
evac
point was far from here.

It didn’t hurt to have a backup plan, but it was a
very tight fit underneath the cloaking sheaths with
Jyra
having to almost lay down around Mace’s waist to fit. Her head wasn’t upright,
but then again she couldn’t see anything other than the camera transmitting to
her HUD, and that didn’t matter since she wasn’t driving.

The Arc Commando did watch as Brandon and Mace flew up
to the outer ring of buildings, picking their spot carefully as they eased up
to one and all but landed on the roof of the 4 story tall structure. It didn’t
have windows, which was common for their low lying structures. They knew enough
about lizard infrastructure to know it was an industrial warehouse of some
sort, the contents of which they didn’t know, nor were they going to find out.
They had a variety of targets available to them to hit, but right now staying
hidden was all that mattered.

Creeping from roof to roof and zipping across sections
of city where they found a hole in the traffic patterns, the two speeders
stayed together and traveled far inside the outer perimeter, avoiding the
heavily defended infrastructure and zigzagging across the mundane structures.
Most of those were residential or more warehouses, and they set down on the
roof of one residential complex when their primary target came within sight.

Or rather the top of it, most of the hatchery was
situated below ground but the entrances were fairly well defended. They were
going to have to sneak their way in from here, and the best way they knew how
was to go underground themselves and travel over to the facility via the tunnel
network.

Jyra
slid out from under the
cloaking sheath along with Mace and jogged over to one of the roof entrances
that Leo was already working on cutting into, for it wasn’t a personnel
entrance, but rather an exhaust vent. The Archons might be able to walk down
through a lizard building, wave their hands and make all the occupants forget
seeing them, but the Arc Commandos’ Ikrid abilities were not so advanced. With
the cover of night and luck having allowed them to get this far, and their
bikes wedged up against roof outcroppings where they would hopefully not be
noticed, they were going to take the ventilation system route to get into the
substructure and therefore hopefully preserve the anonymity of their exit
point.

But in truth, from here on out they were making up
everything as they went.

Leo lifted the grated cover off and
Jyra
slid into the meter-wide shaft first, having to wiggle
around to get her pack to fit inside. With her legs and arms spread out like a
vice, she lowered herself with a controlled slide all the way through the
building down into the substructure where the environmental systems where
gathering the excess heat produced within the building and shunting it outside
so the lizards wouldn’t cook themselves in the close confines of their packed
city.

This wasn’t the first time she’d been in such a shaft
and
Jyra
knew what to do at the base, using a cutting
tool to make a hole just above the bottom that led into a maintenance crawlway.
One good thing about lizard infrastructure was that it almost never changed,
and each planet had identical buildings created from a very large playbook.
Learn it, and you’d be able to get around anywhere within their cities no
matter what arrangement they placed the buildings in.

“Clear,”
Jyra
said over
their short range
comm
as she kicked her legs through
the opening and slid out of the shaft as the other three started to come down.
Maneuvering with her pack on was difficult, but it was something she’d gotten
used to on previous missions and didn’t hold her up much now. Leading the way
into an empty room, checked beforehand with her Ikrid, she slid out of the
crawlway and got onto her feet, brandishing a pair of stun pistols and walking
across to the nearby open doorway and held position there while the others
caught up.

“How we doing?” Brandon asked, bringing up the rear.

“Not a peep yet.”

He passed her by and took the lead as the foursome
began to move through the bottom of the residential complex until they came to
the interconnecting tunnels buried deep underground. There they found their
first live lizards in the form of a line pushing hover crates down a long,
highway-like lateral shaft.

“Can’t go that way,” Mace commented.

“No, we’re going across,” Brandon said.

“Across?”
Jyra
clarified.

“We’ll have to distract them.”

“There are too many.”

“We wait for a gap…it’ll work.”

“Too risky,” she urged.

“Not sure what you’re thinking, bro,” Leo added.

“I’m thinking that if we have to take a detour around
this we’re going to waste a couple of extra hours and probably have to go back
topside anyway.”

“There might be some auxiliary shafts crisscrossing
this main,”
Jyra
offered.

Mace gently shook his head. “It’s a main for a reason.
If there are auxiliaries they’ll be power lines or other utilities. We could
spend hours looking and find nothing. He’s right, we
gotta
get across here. I just don’t know a good way.”

“The doorway on the other side is clear, we just have
to sprint across when they’re not looking.”

“They’re all looking this way from the left,”
Jyra
argued, “and who knows when someone will come back
from the right side.”

“Mace, you’re up first.”

“First for what?” he asked Brandon, but stepped up
alongside him just shy of the doorway and out of sight to the left of the
lizards passing by.

“When I say go, quietly and quickly cross to the other
side.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

Mace sighed. “Ok, buddy. You better know what you’re
doing.”

Brandon closed his eyes and concentrated all his focus
in one direction, reaching out with his Ikrid and touching the lizard minds
closest on the left. Within his range he could sense six, with a seventh
approaching as another crossed their path and he discounted that one. So long
as he and the others didn’t turn around they shouldn’t have to worry about
them.

It was the ones pushing the crates in their direction
that could see them, so he gently froze their perceptions with a light haze,
causing their thoughts to wonder a bit while their actions remained the same.
They could see ahead, but weren’t paying attention to what was around them, and
as soon as he was sure it was working he double tapped Brandon on the shoulder
and the Arc Commando jogged out into the open directly behind the lizard that
had just passed him.

He crossed two meters behind him, stepping as quietly
as he could over to the far doorway and around the corner, getting out of
sight.

“We clear over there?”
Jyra
asked.

“Standby,” Mace said, then after a long moment he
added, “Clear.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said in amazement.

“We’re not done yet,” Brandon said, keeping
rudimentary contact with the minds to the left but releasing one that just
passed them by and picked up another one as it came into range. “Leo, you’re
up.”

“Ready,” he said, taking a knee next to Brandon around
the corner. He got the double tap on the shoulder then jerked backwards instantly
when Mace called him off.

“Wait!” he warned.

“What’s up?”
Jyra
asked so
Brandon didn’t have to.

“30 seconds. Got a roamer here.”

“Just one?”

“Yeah, and he’s taking his time.”

“You ok?”

“I’m out of view, but the doorway isn’t.”