Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67) (10 page)

“Oh, and if the other Clans ask for volunteers as
well, feel free to help them if you wish, but I can guarantee you my standards
for membership will be higher than theirs, for I know better than them what
you’re capable of. And I’d prefer if the best of you tried to get into Clan
Star Fox before you accepted any of their invites…especially after we show them
what you guys can really do.”

“Thank you for giving permission for us to entertain
their offers, but I can assure you that no Kiritas would choose to work in any
other part of Star Force if given the option of joining your Clan, even if it
was only for a week. We are humbled…”

Randy raised a warning finger.

“…honored by your offer,” the Kiritas corrected
himself, “and will supply you with as many volunteers as you can make use of.”

“Good,” Randy said, cracking a sarcastic smile.
“Humble workers are no good. Too lazy.”

10

January 3, 2814

Unknown System
beyond Delta Region

Lizard territory

Kara crept along the low mountain ridge, staying
within the nooks and crannies on the terrain as she magnified her vision of the
distant lizard mining outpost. They had over 100 of them set up on the planet,
all of which were feeding the development of two small but growing colonies in
this backwater expansion. The local population was gone, but their corpses still
littered parts of the planet giving Kara an idea of the timeframe of the
invasion. She guessed the lizards had been here less than 2 years, with the
most recent to have died within 4 months. Had she arrived sooner she would have
been able to save them, and was silently cursing their luck.

That wasn’t why she was here, though. She’d come far
out from Star Force territory, traveling directly up on the galactic plane
until she reached an unmapped region that the lizards were casually pushing
into with what looked like no resistance. She couldn’t be sure, having only
lightly scouted a few systems along the way, but this planet only had three cruisers
to defend it, suggesting that the locals had been primitive pushovers.

Kara could destroy the entire lizard occupation
herself if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the mission. There were a lot of
lizards closer to Star Force territory for her to go after if she just wanted
to work on her kill count rather than spending 8 months traveling out to this
distant lizard border. No, she was here to exploit their weak areas and do to
them what they had done to Star Force so long ago…though technically it had been
inept civilian contractors. They’d been blindsided by the presence of the
invaders on Corneria, and now she was going to turn the tables and hit the
lizards where they didn’t expect Star Force to be.

And she needed to do it quietly so not to draw
attention, hence her sneaking around and approaching across land rather than
just dropping down from orbit on top of them. The Clan Sangheili warship that
she’d borrowed was tucked away safely around another planet and hidden from the
lizard sensors, with her and a team of volunteers having come down via a fleet
of dropships onto an uninhabited part of the planet. They were staying out of
sight miles away while she crept in towards this isolated outpost, figuring out
how she was going to play this.

Most of the complex appeared to be below ground, with
several structures sprouting out of the sparse vegetation and marking the
location like pillars. Kara could also see several adjacent buildings, but
everything was pretty compact…which was to her advantage. She spotted no guard
towers or turrets, but she knew better than to assume there would be no guards
on station, though from this range she wasn’t going to be able to pick them out
if they were concealed behind the scrub brush of ugly trees that were more
thorns than leaves.

Scanning the terrain in between her and the outpost
she plotted her course and began moving, walking/running where needed and
flying spot to spot inches off the ground whenever possible. It was dark, so
her shadow mode made her virtually invisible to the lizard eyes, but she could
detect scattering traces of sensor beams reflecting down from the atmosphere,
telling her that there was an aerial detection array in place. Kara didn’t know
at what altitude it was operating, so she had to go in on the ground.

It was possible that her shadow mode and other
countermeasures might be able to hide her, but there was no point in taking any
chances this early in the game. Unnoticed wasn’t something that you could get
back once squandered, so she was going to take this slow and easy, working her
way up close to the lizard outpost and keeping an eye out for whatever
surveillance they might have in play.

Kara wasn’t expecting much, given how low scale the
lizard presence was on this colony, and she wasn’t disappointed. Once she got
in close she found three scouts on patrol around the site and another two
within. Accessing their minds she secured enough information to know that
another shipment of processed ore was coming up from below within the hour and
a flight of Kirbies would be here in approximately six to pick it and the
others up. Right now the landing platform was only a fifth full of crates, so
Kara decided to wait it out a bit longer and took the opportunity to sneak
inside the perimeter and do some wall crawling.

She found the sensor array easy enough and hacked into
it, inserting a program that would ignore a certain vector and allow free
flight without registered detection, despite the fact that the sensor beams
would still be going out as normal. With that built-in corridor established she
commed
two of her distant dropships and got them on
the move, albeit slowly and over ground, much as she’d approached by.

While they were on their way the main cargo doors to
the subsurface structure opened up and allowed an elevator platform rise even
with ground level. On it were a few dozen lizards that proceeded to transfer
the new crates full of valuable materials off the lift and over to a waiting
area on the edge of the landing pad. The lift went down again and came back up
three more times before they finally finished, with Kara holding the dropships
off back beyond the ridgeline until they were done.

Reaching out with her Ikrid she scanned the
surrounding buildings and started knocking everyone unconscious, having to move
around a bit to get within range and doing it in a way that no one would see
someone else just keel over and have time to wonder what was going on. She
finished up with the perimeter guards, seeking them out and giving them the
remote night tap before calling the dropships in at speed.

Two
Falcon
-class
vessels zipped in over top of the lizard mining colony and landed on the pad with
Kara standing watch via Ikrid and ready to subdue anyone that woke up or, more
likely, came up from below ground. A crew of techs spilled out of the dropships
and began moving the lizard crates inside using their own equipment. They
worked quickly and got the two ships nearly full before all the cargo was
onboard and the landing platform was clear of crates. Kara signaled them to
leave by the same vector they arrived and held position until they were out of
sight.

She dropped down from her perch near the lift and
moved out closer to where she dropped the perimeter guards, taking control of
their bodies and standing them up so that when she woke them they wouldn’t
realize that any time had passed. It was a tricky thing to do, but each one
shook off the disorientation and continued on about their patrols, minds
focused on the present and washing away the bit of curiousness as to their
momentary mental blip.

Kara kept to her stealth and moved over near the
buildings, doing the same with those inside though it was harder, for they were
doing more than walking. She tried to disguise their waking up as much as
possible, but there was no way at least some of them wouldn’t realize they’d
been taking a nap. Still, the more confusion she could sow the better, so she
tweaked the waking patterns enough that with a little memory implantation she
convinced them that some noxious fumes had escaped containment and rendered
them unconscious.

It wouldn’t hold up to an examination of the facts
later, but it would keep them preoccupied with internal matters for the moment,
and with the perimeter guards swearing that a group of Kirbies had come in to
take the cargo crates early, Kara figured she could cause a lot more mayhem
before the lizard planet began to suspect they had unwelcome company.

Climbing up to the sensor array again Kara undid and
deleted her programming cover so that it wouldn’t be around to be found, then
dropped back to ground and distracted the scouts’ minds as she crept off into
the night and headed back overland to the ridgeline, then from there on back to
the rendezvous point with the dropships via direct flight once her sensor
silhouette was blocked by the terrain.

“What did we get?” she asked as she landed inside the
open ramp to one of the full dropships as they all sat parked on a dirt-covered
plain in the middle of nowhere to the distant north.

“Nothing special,” one of her new Clan Ghostblade
techs answered, “just some iron and carbon pellets.”

“I wasn’t hoping for special,” she said, retracting
her armor back into her forearm jewel with the red scales vanishing to reveal
her white with dark blue stripe Archon uniform. “Just useful.”

“It’s free,” another commented. “And I really like
free.”

“So do
I
,” Kara said with a
smirk. “That went well, but let’s hit a few other locations before they have a
chance to think about what’s going on.”

“You want us to take this load back to the jumpship?”

“No. Stay here and we’ll all go back together. If we
get spotted I’m your only defense, so we can’t afford to split up.”

“Right. Where to next?”

“Southeast of here there are a couple of outposts
within 50 miles of each other. I want to hit them both. If that doesn’t fill
the holds we’ll sniff around the others. I got the impression that there’s a
regular shipment pattern and if we start catching them when they’re full we
won’t have to make as many raids.”

“And when they do figure out what’s going on?”

“We’ll play it by ear, but we’re not tipping out hand
and exposing ourselves. We have to be ghosts in this, no matter what they
suspect.”

“Understood.”

“Give me a head start, then bring four empty dropships
with you to the rendezvous point I lay down.”

Kara turned and walked two steps back towards the open
ramp, then her body was covered in the red scales once again as she shot off
into the dark.

“Damn, I really want one of those,” a tech said, with
the others nodding their wholehearted agreement.

Kara and her crew continued to raid the lizard planet
for the next 2 months, gaining both resources and information. With a map of
the nearby lizard colonies she was able to pick and choose her targets more
carefully, focusing on the slightly larger worlds and getting a wide choice of
supplies to raid from for the following year then, with a hold full of stolen
goods, she ordered her jumpship back to a predetermined rendezvous point on the
edge of Delta Region.

When she returned she found a handful of other ships
waiting for her…all of which were running under Clan Ghostblade IDs. None were
new constructions, for per operating orders Kara had to build everything
herself so there were no records to trace back to, meaning the jumpship she was
on
had
to be returned to Clan Sangheili at some
point, and the same was true of the six jumpships ahead that were waiting for
her. Those, she quickly saw, were carrying brand new smaller vessels in their
external docking holds, and they definitely weren’t drones.

“Greetings Clan Leader,” Lev-922 said with a smile as
his holographic image popped up next to Kara’s command chair.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked with a
laugh.

“I volunteered,” the fellow Saber admitted. “Though
you could use some more psionic help with your raids.”

“I’ll take any help I can get. You with or without
padawan?”

“Without. She was ready to fly solo anyway, and with
her being a Firestorm I couldn’t bring her in on this.”

“What else did Paul send me?”

“Archon-wise none, but Jason sent along a couple of
rangers. As far as the ships go we’ve got prototype Ghostblade industry ships
with jump capability within a system. We’re still going to have to ferry them
around by jumpship, and these are just on loan until we can build our own.”

“I know. What about support personnel?”

“Got an army of techs for you and a scattering of
Regulars. Paul and Jason will send more if you need them, but they figured you
were going to be pulling mostly solo ops for a while.”

“Now that you’re here that’s not true, but I am
looking at going after their shipping lanes if we can figure out a way to get
the cargo transferred. I haven’t killed any lizards yet and I want to keep it
that way for now.”

“Generous of you.”

“I’d rather trick and steal from the helpless rather
than slaughter them.”

“If they’re traveling in convoy we can take two ships,
swap one crew for the other’s cargo and let them go on their merry way while we
take the other one off their hands.”

“That’s a lot of minds to freeze, and on two ships
simultaneously. Until you got here that wasn’t an option.”

“And now?”

“How many drones you got?

“Six cutters, three corvettes, and a destroyer. But I
thought you were thinking about taking them from the inside?”

“I can sneak onboard, if I’m lucky. You, not so much.”

“Piggyback ride?”

“My armor can’t expand coverage like that. Are any of
those drones interceptors?”

“Three cutters are, but we’ve got some other mods
onboard if you want to swap them out.”

“Good. If we’re going to be jumping convoys we’re
going pirate, not sneak thief. What’s the timetable look like before we can
start building our own drones?”

“Depends how much these babies are fed.”

“I’ve got a jumpship full of raw materials to start
with.”

“The plan Paul sent along has us building a myriad of
other ships, mostly duplicates, before we start trying to go for a mobile
shipyard, but the plans for one are here and the segments break apart into
individual ships…but we’ll need a secure location to set up in, and in theory
the teardown time will be in the hours, not the minutes.”

“Ground or orbit?”

“I believe ground is preferred, but they’re also
capable of orbital production.”