Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (9 page)

When they got down almost all the way to the target
they turned hard right and Karen launched her brother across the gap long jump
style, steering him to the wall niche a few meters below the edge that he
entered feet first, sliding into a short tunnel about Hobbit height. As soon as
he was inside he emitted a Fornax field and kept it up, sliding/crawling his
way into a connecting tunnel and dragging one twitching lizard out of his way,
kneeing him in the ribs as he pushed by him.

Maintaining the Fornax field at half his maximum
radius wasn’t hard, but the longer he kept at it the more stress his head would
feel, and like pulling on a rubber band, the further you stretched it the more
power it took to maintain the effort, meaning he was on the clock.

Scurrying his way through the small tunnels he pulled
a fishhook turn that led him back to a concealed bunker that had one-way view
panes into the gap, hidden behind a clever holographic camouflage screen of
leaves and sticks that were also transparent with barely an outline showing on
the wall of the little, traitorous den. There were three lizards inside, all
lying on the floor save for one, who was twitching uncontrollably in his seat
as Travis’s head began to complain from the sustained effort.

He pulled out a pistol from his back rack and shot
them all twice in the head, then pushed their bodies over the entrance and
stacked them up like
lego
bricks, blocking the
entrance.

“Got it,” he told Karen via
comm
,
now that she was running like crazy back through the forest to the Calavari with
an angry army of lizards following her and hopefully not noticing him. “Tell
them the trigger is secure and I’ll remain here to make sure it stays that
way.”

“You want me to double back and help?”

“No, just get clear. These tiny tunnels mean they
don’t have a chance of getting to me, and there’s a camouflaged window here I
can break out of if I have to, so I’m not pinned in.”

“They can break in too, you know.”

“I’m fine. Get the team up here and take out those
sniper positions before the Calavari start pouring through like big fat
targets.”

“Alright, see you after,” Karen said, with her soon
passing outside of his ability to mentally track. Their battlemeld and twin
link were broken, leaving Travis with only his own thoughts for a while, which
was odd considering how they did almost everything together.

But then again this wasn’t the first time they’d split
up, and they had trained themselves accordingly so that it didn’t become a
weakness. Still, the sooner his sister was back inside his head again the
better. For now though, there were lizards scurrying about in the tunnels on
the other side of his meat blockade and he intended to gum up the tiny roads
with as many sleeping beauties as he could arrange.

9

June 1, 2756

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Liam returned to his command ship’s nexus, having
spent a very long couple of
months
groundside since
his last visit doing commando work and helping to take down key targets during
or in front of the massed assaults on the remaining lizard colonies. Now there
were only 7 remaining, spread out widely across the planet having been bypassed
by the Star Force troops because they were trap cities. Five of them still had
their orbital defense towers intact, but the trailblazers had decided not to
risk any more clandestine assault teams, for the last one that Morgan and Kara
had been on had turned into a wounded evacuation run.

It’d had five mages, three padawans, plus the two
trailblazers and hadn’t managed to kill the tower. After the three previous
successes and numerous other similar missions behind enemy lines in the less
defended colonies the lizards had enacted numerous new safeguards, some of
which had involved detonating entire buildings around the tower when security
breaches were noted. The team had been in one of them when it came down, but
fortunately the armor they were all wearing kept them alive, not to mention a
few hasty bioshields being thrown up in the process.

Six of them had been wounded to the point of limping,
with three having to be carried out and an air
evac
being impossible. Kara had got them through it, going rogue and hunting the
lizards in the depths of their substructures to act as a diversion and to clear
passages, with a one-armed Morgan doing plenty of damage despite her left limb
having been broken and hanging limp inside her cracked armor. Others had been
more badly injured, but the few that had only a few dings in the chaotic
building collapse supported the trailblazer enough to get everyone out.

That was three months ago, and all the Archons in
questioned had long since returned to battle after regenerator treatments. The
V’kit’no’sat tech was still far ahead of Star Force medical devices and rebuilt
their bodies within hours, though all were weaker for it after the
fact…something that infuriated Morgan to no end because it could possibly see
her losing her top Archon status.

After that mess the trap cities had been ignored, with
assaults on the others continuing with less surprises but still an incredible
amount of heavy fighting. The lizards were no longer the soft targets they once
were, and it seemed like the entire point of their planetary defense being a
test of their new tech and tricks. The trap cities that remained would give the
lizards even more data to work with when Star Force hit them, and the
interstellar transmitters that each had were continually broadcasting signals
out to other lizard worlds when they came within line of sight during the
planet’s rotation, meaning that even if no lizard left the system alive their
empire would still gain from the knowledge of what had happened here.

And of what it took to stop or kill the Star Force
troops.

But with the rest of the colonies now destroyed the
amount of firepower a single, or two orbital guns could throw back at the fleet
was low. But then again their defense fleet was near to anemic, for the lizards
had been continually sending in relief fleets to whittle their drones down.
Star Force had been bringing in occasional jumpship fleets with replacement
warships but their hold on the planet was tenuous, though there was little
chance of the lizards actually retaking it with the two Sentinels in
orbit…short of yet another escalation that had Liam a bit concerned.

They needed to finish off Varasiss soon and start
fortifying it themselves, and to do that these last few colonies had to go.

Rather than waste more drones on an orbital assault,
or even use the command ships and see them potentially take more hull damage on
top of what they’d already racked up to date, Liam accessed the Sentinels and
had their limited engines begin altering their orbits to bring them down to a
very low altitude rendezvous point. He wanted both of them together to insure
that neither one lost shields, for to date they hadn’t been scratched and
letting the lizards get a few hits in now would have been beyond sloppy.

It took a great deal of time to get them together,
then as they lowered themselves with their anti-
grav
running high to counteract the planet’s gravity they started taking fire from a
single phaser beam coming up from the surface. The pink energy tore through the
clouds and hit the starboard Sentinel’s shields, with them warding off the
attack with ease. Liam studied the data from the shield loss and ran through
the quick math, seeing that it would take more than 500 hits at present levels
to penetrate.

That wouldn’t take too long, for the recycle on the
lizard gun was only 1.7 seconds. Liam held off firing the Sentinels’ weapons
until both were in position, using the extra energy to supplement the gravity
drives and shields, then pulled power from the latter and engaged the heaviest
cleansing beams.

Six beams from each shot down their pale white lines
and hit the defense shield covering the lizard colony, with their recharge
rates linked together so they all hit simultaneously in an attempt to create a
momentary breach with the overload and sneak some damage through. The slugging
match that followed was mostly one sided, with the lizard colony’s shields
coming down within a minute and the defense tower another 20 seconds later.
That ended the orbital threat, for no missiles had been fired from the surface,
oddly enough, but then again the Sentinels had enough anti-air weapons to knock
them down with ease, so Liam wasn’t sure if this colony didn’t have them or
wasn’t choosing to waste them.

There were numerous defense turrets across the city,
but it was impossible to determine exactly what they all were when some were
buried beneath armor plating until they were revealed. At this point Liam
didn’t care, and quickly reset the power flow away from the shields and into
the weapons in order to give the Sentinels full firing capability. Targeting
the beams himself, he began to cut the colony’s buildings apart, starting first
with the defense turrets and hangars, then moving on to the other buildings
while the wisp cloud that had been hiding underneath the city shield began to
grow and disperse, running off to other locations around the planet.

There was no knowing how many other lizard bases were
concealed on Varasiss, and with some luck they might lead them to one. He
didn’t expect the enemy to be that sloppy, but you never knew.

The Star Force fighters patrolling the planet were
ordered to keep their distance and let the lizards run while the Sentinels
bombarded the colony, then moved on to the others. Once they had all of them
torn to shreds they’d begin hunting down the remaining units across the planet,
and there was no point in risking further engagements until that was completed.

After several hours of bombardment Liam redirected the
Sentinels to the pair of colonies remaining that had overlapping fields of
fire, knowing this would be the bigger test. Based on the data from the single
beam he knew there wouldn’t be a mathematical issue with taking them down, but
still there was always an opportunity for surprises, and with the pair of
phaser beams reaching up to strike back at the Sentinels came the missiles from
both colonies.

Liam turtled up and deactivated the cleansing beam,
routing full power to the shields and point defense weapons, weathering the
missile storm until it eventually ran out and knocking down most of them before
they could hit. When they ceased and only the ongoing phaser strikes continued
he reengaged the cleansing beams and began hammering against one of the two
cities’ shield discs.

It took a while to knock it down, then the tower, then
he did the same to the second colony, but he managed it all without so much as
a shot hitting the hull of either defense station. Afterwards he turned the
firing control over to other gunners and let them methodically rip apart the
two cities while he left the nexus and headed to the command ship’s sanctum for
a good long run before catching a few hours of needed sleep and returning to
the bridge to oversee the next colony attack.

Meanwhile the ground troops were out and about in
numerous locations, hunting down and
safing
the
underground tunnels in the colonies that had already seen combat and were now
nominally in Star Force hands…though all that meant was a handful of scouts
looking for lingering enemies. The planet was huge and now full of ruins,
without enough troops to properly occupy each site. From the reports continuing
to come in there were still lots of pockets of small resistance everywhere,
with about half of them operating with cohesion rather than random, last ditch
attacks from survivors.

The other four trailblazers and Kara were down there
leading the efforts to eradicate them and locate what they thought were hidden
control centers. There were so many tunnels underground that a good portion of
their drone fleet was now floating over the surface doing intense scans to try
and locate them in an effort to identify potential traps before the Archons and
others started their expeditions into new areas. Morgan especially wanted to be
there running point to look for more detonation devices, and while they hadn’t
seen hardly any employed in such a manner during the length of the invasion,
the gradually increasing popularity of blowing up your own building to get the
enemies inside was alarming.

If that trend continued Star Force was going to have
to readjust their tactics when assaulting other lizard worlds, else risk losing
chunks of personnel with every structure they forced their way into. When you
didn’t care about dying and were just trying to achieve maximum damage to your
enemy you opened up a lot of
darkside
tactical
options that looked like they were
uncounterable
, but
Liam and the other trailblazers were notorious for finding ways to get around
the problem, though this one was going to be one of the worst to tackle to
date.

Kara flew across the sky a couple miles above the
surface of their recently reclaimed planet, traveling from one ruined colony to
another as she took a momentary break from tunnel diving and just did some
patrolling up top. There were no Star Force fighters in the area at the moment,
and the lizard survivors had a habit of moving from place to place so that when
you finally did fully clear out a city, if that was even confirmable, they
could move back in again coming over ground. The areas with wide plains were
easy to spot them on, but the forested areas not so much.

She didn’t expect to spot any lizards in the trees
from this altitude, but felt like snooping around a bit while another
subsurface assault team was getting prepped for her to lead. The Scionate she’d
been with had been recalled and a group of Calavari were coming in to replace
them, though they weren’t exactly the best at crawling around in small spaces.
Most of the lizard infrastructure underground was large enough to accommodate
them, but it was the small auxiliary tunnels that they couldn’t fit inside, nor
did Kara like the idea of crawling in there herself.

More than once she’d gotten a bit claustrophobic,
recognizing the fact that if she got pinned there it would be almost impossible
to dig her way out. It was worse for the others because they didn’t have her
Vorch’nas, and talk amongst the trailblazers was that some of these locations
would best be dug out from the top and simply removed from the surface in a
massive earth moving endeavor rather than trying to explore and safe them
manually.

Some prototype AI drones were getting their evaluation
work in, with masses of the things being ordered up for production in the ADZ
and shipped out here, with the first load scheduled to arrive within the month.
They were all the size of a bowling ball or smaller, with
interconnective
capability like the drone warships used but designed to operate almost
exclusively in blackout situations like, say, having tons of rock between you
and a transmitter.

They weren’t combat models, with Star Force not
trusting computer programming with weapons in an urban setting. There were too
many factors to preprogram for, and they didn’t want so much as one accidental
death because of a
miscalibration
. Artificial
intelligence was a myth, and a machine could only do what it was programmed to
do. Without someone at the controls that programming would always be limited
and unable to adapt to new situations, hence the little bug bots didn’t get
weapons.

What they were was surveillance and scouting
equipment, able to transmit to each other over short distances and extend a net
of
comm
and control lines down through tunnel
networks if placed appropriately and in large enough numbers. Right now the
bots they had were scouring the innards of one dead lizard colony, mapping it
out as they went and roaming where they chose underground. They’d discovered
three lizard hideouts so far, as well as constructing a battlemap of the lower
regions without any Archon or Regular having to hike down every corridor.

The prototypes were serving their purpose more here
than ever expected, for this was the largest subsurface infrastructure they’d
seen from the lizards to date and Kara expected jumpships full of the little
buggers to be roaming the planet for years to come as they slowly deconstructed
the mess. Everything Calavari had been eradicated by the lizards in their time
here, and Star Force was intending to return the favor, tearing out all the
lizard infrastructure rather than coopting any of it for their own use.