Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66)

1

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Sam Nestor held his skeet in a steady line as he
glanced at the battlemap, seeing the rest of his 10-man squadron flying around
him at nearly maximum velocity. While their engines could go faster their
shields could only handle so much sustained friction, and traveling up to a
high altitude for the diminished drag would actually take longer to reach their
target so they’d decided to punch through the densest region overland as
quickly as possible, with each of the fighters being a fiery meteor on its way
to the distress beacon.

That beacon had gone out with orders, drawing all
mobile units nearby to a particular colony that had inexorably sprouted
containment walls and opened up a flood of lizard reinforcements from below,
including a cloud of wisps that was now measuring over 300,000 and still
growing. The Star Force aerial craft that had been on site previously were now
gone, either shot down or retreated, and heading directly into that mess was a
virtual death sentence. Naval assistance would have been very nice right about
now, but a few limited attempts had already been thwarted.

The main defense tower for the colony was already
down, but enough nearby ones were still online to prevent any warship from
coming within firing range. Despite that fact, one of the command ships had
flown down and got its shields hammered long enough to unleashed three
Ka’sevron rounds towards the colony, set to detonate in the atmosphere rather
than hit the surface where their troops were, with the intent being to knock
down a lot of the fighters while they were grouped so close together.

None of the three rounds made it to the target, one getting
sniped down by a lucky phaser shot coming from the nearby colonies while the
other two were hit with anti-air missile swarms from the same sources. The Clan
team that had gone in to knock out the anti-air defenses in this city had paved
the way for the skeets to come in on a very low ground level, but rise high
enough up and you’d expose yourself to the long range anti-air from the
neighboring locations, which unfortunately the descending missiles had to pass
through.

Sam was currently flying under that ceiling, having
been pulled off another assault and redirected to the ambush site along with
numerous other units. He could see a large group of Calavari Valeries
approaching from further away to the south, plus a scattering of Canderous
remote fighters being controlled from orbit. Everyone else was further away,
leaving Sam’s skeet squadron and a few others nearby as the closest
reinforcements.

His squadron had been configured for anti-air
operations, but a few of the others had anti-tank and standard variety skeets,
plus a few gunships that were going to be badly needed here. He knew they
couldn’t dive into the swarm, but if they could entice a portion of it out from
the city to chase them they could double back and pick them apart slowly…not
fast enough to get to the troops inside the colony, or what was left of them, but
they had to start somewhere.

This was by far the largest concentration of wisps the
lizards had deployed, and they were all coming up out of subsurface hangars.
That was insane, and made it look all the more obvious that this was some sort
of preplanned trap…but to what end? Even if they killed all the Star Force
troops within the city that was only a small portion of the invasion army. It
was true that they were having trouble beating the lizard defenses down as
quickly as they’d originally hoped, but this one debacle wasn’t going to stop
the inevitable progress they were making across the planet, so what the hell
were they thinking?

And more importantly, if they had anticipated an
invasion and prepared for it, what was special about this one colony, or were
there more of these wall rings hidden around other sites?

Another contact on the battlemap nearing his squadron
at high speed caught Sam’s eye. At first he assumed it was some type of
missile, wondering if a Ka’sevron had been smuggled down to the surface and
fired off at low range to beat the anti-air defenses, but they weren’t built
for gravity resistant flight. The icon on it was definitely Star Force, but
then he realized that it wasn’t a weapon per se, but rather a unit traveling at
speeds the skeets could never hope to match and catching up with them quickly.

Sam activated the
comm
channel reserved for his squadron. “Heads up, the Queen of Diamonds is in
play.”

“Music to my ears,” one of the other aerial Regulars
replied as Kara’s icon shot by the squadron to their left and didn’t slow to
keep pace with them.

“Looks like she’s going on ahead. I know she’s nimble,
but watch your firing lines when we get there. She may juke into them as easily
as
away
, so keep a good margin when the fray starts.”

“How are we playing this?”

“Lightly,” Sam insisted. “Even the gunships can’t plow
right in, so we’re going to have to nibble.”

“The ground troops don’t have that kind of time,”
another pilot said. “Have you seen the estimated number of ground troops
they’ve deployed inside the walls?”

“I know, but we’re no good to them dead. We can’t go
anywhere near that swarm and expect to survive for more than thirty seconds.”

“How about a 20 second hop in and out then?”

“I feel the same way you do, but we can’t beat these
guys, only trim them down a little. So let’s focus on that.”

“What do you think she’s up to then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe heading to ground like Larissa
did, or maybe she’s going to fight the swarm too. If she wants us to coordinate
she’ll tell us, but aside from direct orders we’re not going to dive right into
the lizards’ preferred kill zones.”

“Agreed,” another pilot said. “Are we waiting for the
gunships or start nibbling on our own?”

“We can’t wait. Let’s see how many we can bait out and
knock down. If they flood towards us we lead them off and hope someone else can
exploit the opportunity.”

“Copy that.”

Sam looked ahead, through the battlemap since the
camera view was little more than a fireball at this point. The shields were
keeping his hull safe, but there was so much turbulence covering the
needle-shaped energy barrier that it was disrupting a lot of his sensors. The
battlemap connection was holding, so he could fly by that along with a few
other means, but he was definitely isolated from the outside world in the
friction cocoon, with the other members of his squadron flying nearby but far
enough away that his turbulence wouldn’t interfere with them.

The trip over was a lot of waiting, but when they were
still more than two minutes out Kara’s signal intercepted the lizard swarm and
he immediately saw two enemy signals wink out, followed by a stream of others.
He didn’t know how she was taking them down, but the question as to whether she
was going to ground or not appeared to have been answered.

Sam gripped the flight controls eagerly, then began to
decelerate well beyond the colony perimeter along with the rest of his
squadron. The fireball faded and his camera views that covered the interior of
the opaque canopy returned. He reset his shields to conform to the T-shape of
his craft and felt a considerable amount of drag hit the skeet, slowing it even
more until the normal feel returned and the magically appearing boundary wall
came into view ahead on the horizon, with the bee hive of tiny green dots
hovering over top of it so thick that they looked like a sick cloud.

“
Irelia
, Candice…go knock on
the door.”

On his order two of the skeets stopped decelerating
and shot on ahead while Sam and the others began taking on a holding pattern.
In response a plume of wisps shot out from the cloud to intercept the pair,
exchanging a bit of weapons fire, blue for Star Force and all pink for the
lizards. That was a bad sign, meaning that these wisps were the upgraded
variety with greater range and kill power. He just hoped they hadn’t added
shields yet.

As the two Regulars swung around after killing five of
the wisps, they dragged their pursuit with them and out away from the rest of
the cloud, bring them back towards Sam and the others.

The pilot cringed, for there were hundreds following
them out and only the 10 of them, with Kara nowhere near them to help out.

“Here we go. Don’t get greedy and pull back at the
first sign of trouble. We can repeat as often as we want,” he said, readying
his plasma scatterguns and taking aim at a clump of fighters nearing his
position. He swerved slightly to the left and accelerated hard, getting up
close to them and unloading into their general area, seeing bits of plasma hit
their hulls and confirming that they had no shields, but aside from some smoke
trails on the others only one went down.

From that point on Sam was lost in the twists and
turns of combat, seeing nothing else of the multifaceted battle as he was
consumed with his little corner of it.

“This is insane,”
Namkrel
said over the
comm
to his fellow mech pilots as they
flew their
Jamtror
-class war machines
towards the distant colony capped by a swarm of lizard wisps.

“There’s an army of Bsidd in there, not to mention a
lot of Humans, the Queen of Diamonds, and a trailblazer,” Hemror said firmly.
“We’re going in.”

“How?” another Calavari mechwarrior asked as their
group of 34 jamtrors flew in aerial mode side by side, having gathered from
three different battles at a series of rendezvous points while other units
raced on ahead to relieve the besieged Star Force troops.

“We go as far as we can by air, then fight the rest of
the way in on the ground.”

“I don’t think we can make it to the wall in the air.”

“Neither do
I
, so we’re going
to land outside and beat the crap out of their wisps until the skies clear
enough for us to get over.”

“Now that sounds like a plan,”
Namkrel
said, reversing himself. “For a second I thought we were going to fly straight
into that mess.”

“We’re not that reckless,” the Calavari said with a
bit of sarcasm. “But we’re not going to let our allies die retaking
our
capitol.”

“Have you looked at the battlemap?” another in the
group asked via comm. “There are a lot of downed signatures in there.”

“If all we can save is one, then we save one,” Hemror
said, making it clear with his tone that there was no room for argument. “Then
we avenge those that were ambushed.”

“Alright, let’s do this,”
Namkrel
said, a mix of eagerness and worry. “Give us a waypoint.”

“In a moment. Let’s see if we can’t sneak a little closer.
Follow me down,” Hemror said, dropping his flying mech from altitude until he
was skimming the grassy plain they were approaching by. It was the least
contended approach, but with plenty of wisps circling around lazily above the
city waiting for anyone to get close. The mechwarrior kept his bulky fighter
moving quickly, waiting to see when the enemy would react to their presence.

Like clockwork, when they came within 9 kilometers a
group of wisps broke off and headed towards them, prompting Hemror to mark a
position 3 kilometers away from the wall as their landing point. They would
meet the enemy fighters before that, but their shields and weapons would be
sufficient for them to engage and pass through them before they were
overwhelmed.

“Fire on targets of opportunity, but do not deviate
from course. We have to stay grouped up or they’ll pick us apart individually,”
he said, firing his single lachar at a distant wisp and missing…but managing to
hit the one behind it. The beam punched a hole in the front of the fighter,
penetrating the cockpit and hitting the pilot in the head, dropping the mostly
intact craft to the ground where it plowed into the dirt in a debris-ridden
streak.

“That was a hell of a shot, Hem.”

“Thanks,” he said, not bothering to mention his true
target. He fired off a scattering of lachar blasts with less luck, hitting a
few more of the tightly packed wisps but not taking any out of the sky with the
weak weapon. When they came within range he fired off his scattergun along with
the other pilots and filled the space ahead of them with cones of tiny plasma
packets, catching dozens of wisps as they angled in and peppered the heavily
armored and shielded hulls of the jamtrors with phaser strikes.

Hemror was pleased to have killed at least two
himself, though many of the wisps were flying from cone to cone so it was
impossible to determine how much damage he alone had done. Still, there were
many fighters falling out of the sky, though the mass that had come out to meet
them seemed not to have been thinned, for they were all over them now and
hitting their shields hard with the massed firepower.

The Calavari pushed through it stubbornly, getting to
the waypoint with some of their shields going down and their thick hull plates
beginning to take hits, but Hemror came to a hover over the ground with some
12% remaining and immediately transformed his fighter, with it sprouting legs
and four arms while it floated just above the ground. When the head piece
finally formed he set it down, feet sinking into the grassy soil, and the power
from the anti-
grav
transferred over to his shields,
recharging them at more than double their previous rate.

His light mech sprouted an anti-air cannon and the
Calavari began pepping the sky above him with
sammy
blasts, targeting the approximate area he wanted the computer to chew up, then
its quicker calculating capability tracked and hit the wisps within that area
as they flew about, save for a few that were fast enough to avoid the shots.
Most were too boxed together to maneuver much, so a lot of wisps started to
fall out of the sky, especially when the other mechs landed and contributed
their own fireworks.