Star Force: Survivor (SF52) (8 page)

If the enemy had known exactly where they were they
would have landed right over them or sent in fighters to blast into the trees,
but it seemed they didn’t and just had an approximate location and heading.
That was one more reason why
Iden
was pressing his
attack on the trailing Hobbits, in order to draw the attention to him and away
from the others, but if/when they set down a group of infantry ahead of the
others there was nothing he was going to be able to do to distract them there.

He kept in range of the battle map link as he ran in
and out of the enemy lines, which were constantly trudging through the forest
and giving him plenty of ambush opportunities when the alert came through from
one of the commandos, giving him a heads up that there were enemies
ahead
…

When he saw that
Iden
turned
and ran back to the group, moving far faster than the Hobbits behind could
match and worked hard to catch up, knowing they’d need his help to break
through or divert…which the latter was what occurred. They’d been headed in a
mostly eastern direction, but the group suddenly turned and headed north, with
Iden
catching up to them just as the Hobbits were chewing
away at their back positions.

One of the commandos went down just before he got
there. He didn’t know if he was alive or not but telepathically told one of the
others to check while he went into berserker mode and didn’t concern himself
with anything other than engaging the enemy and killing as many of them as he
could. He moved from one to the other, with his partial shields protecting him
from a scattering of plasma hits until they eventually went down. He risked a
few more kills, grabbing a fresh Hobbit rifle, then turned and followed in the
direction the others had went, darting from tree to tree and trying to give his
shields time to reform, though he took another hit to the left leg, fortunately
in a spot that didn’t have exposed flesh.

The armor there melted slightly, but remained mostly
intact. A few steps later and he was momentarily in the clear and gaining
ground on the others when he noticed another group of Hobbits ahead and coming
at the others from the flank. Apparently they’d set down further to the north
and were coming down on them from multiple angles.

Resigning himself to another scrappy, fatigue-laced
fight he veered off to the right, heading for the nearest of them and jumped
the enemy as they keyed in on the others, shooting many of them at pointblank
range as he ran up on them. He didn’t bother to wait around and make sure they
were dead, for even wounding them at this point was a victory with the ever
moving battlefield.

Slipping back into berserker mode he went to work,
buying the others time and thinning their opponents while drawing as much
attention to
himself
as possible without getting
overwhelmed by enemies.

8

January 23, 2549

Reesi
System

Metropolis

Davi
was beyond tired,
operating completely on biological emergency backups. If he stopped he knew
he’d collapse so he kept moving…always moving, always with the enemy on their
heels or trying to ambush them from ahead. The commandos kept guiding him on,
with the Archon having gone missing again. Yesterday he had went back to divert
their trackers then hadn’t been seen since. At least
Davi
hadn’t seen him, but without a helmet or headset he couldn’t tap into the
battlemap, so it was possible he was still around and just out of sight.

That said
,
he could barely
see two meters in front of his face. It was night and all he could do was stay
with the commando ahead of him and pace in his footsteps. They had nightvision,
he didn’t. And even if he had he wouldn’t have trusted his eyes. His head was
so groggy he was surprised he could even keep his eyelids open, but somehow he
managed and they moved on, getting closer and closer to the Star Force city.

Rio was in a much better position, though his own
ambrosia levels were teetering off. He did have nightvision and battlemap
access through his armor, and they’d just crossed into transmission range from
the city, picking up their telemetry through relays that were constantly
transmitting out. They weren’t within their own transmission range yet, so the
city didn’t know where they were, but Rio could see their status…and it wasn’t
good.

The Skarrons were already assaulting the city, with
half of it having been fully evacuated and the rest in the process of fleeing
while a pitched battle was taking place outside and on portions of the interior.
The defense shield was still up, but there were breach points on the barrier
wall with troops coming through. At the moment they were being held off and the
evacuees were being covered, but if they didn’t get there soon there wouldn’t
be anyone left to evac
them
.

After a long night of continuous running/walking the
commando ahead of
Davi
stopped short and put a hand
on the pilot’s chest to get him to halt. His body didn’t want to, so locked
into movement that the man had to forcibly stop his progress as he looked back
at him through his helmet.

“Wait here…and get down.”

Davi
didn’t have the energy
left to swear or he would have. Dropping to a knee and nearly collapsing down
onto his face he ducked behind the nearest tree and waited as told. The
commando stayed with him, looking up every now and then until a section of
forest blew up not far away as a hail of plasma came down, blasting away the
trees.

Davi
jerked, his nerves
fried on adrenaline, but the commando didn’t move so neither did he. After
about 20 seconds of heated destruction the plasma stopped falling and the
commando yanked
Davi
up onto his feet and literally
dragged him forward by the arm as he fought to get his legs working again.

They headed directly to the blast sight, and as they
got close a fighter sank down into the gap…but with no sound of anti-
grav
. Skarron fighters had a tell-tale hum/whine due to
their inefficiency, but the skeet that was coming down was whisper silent.

“Your ride,” the commando said as he pulled him
forward.
“Hurry.
We only have a small window.”

Seeing a way out
Davi
somehow found more energy within him and pushed on, but the commando was still
providing most of his momentum all the way up to the cockpit that cracked open.
When they got to the side the commando grabbed
Davi
around the waist and literally threw him up to the opening where another pilot
grabbed him and pulled him inside.

“Slide in,” she said, scooting over as much as she
could in her armor. She was a pilot, not an Archon, but she still wore light
armor in case she had to ditch her craft. That made the fit even tighter, but
she moved over to the far side of the cockpit on the pommel seat and pulled him
in almost onto her back.

The cockpit canopy came down and almost fit, but not
quite. A little more wiggling and the two got their bodies aligned enough for
it to seal, clicking shut with a reassuring sound as
Davi
almost lost consciousness.

“Thank you,” he
mouthed,
his
face in her armored shoulder.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, raising the skeet back
up through the hole in the trees and flying as best she could at the odd angle
her body was at. “Had to take down 21 fighters just to get here, and there are
more on the way. We got about 15 more seconds before they’re all over us.”

Davi
didn’t say anything
further, realizing what she was up against and just glad to be inside a ship
again, even if he wasn’t piloting it.

Rio watched the anti-air skeet lift off and move away
from the city and the enemy fighters he could see on battlemap, glad that
they’d gotten the pilot away. That left 11 armored commandos and 1 Archon, who
was current outside their range somewhere delaying the enemy infantry. The
commandos knew what they had to do now and even as Rio watched the skeet move
up and off the 11 of them came together on the run and formed a single file
line as they accelerated up to true commando speed and took off through the
forest at a rate that the Hobbits shouldn’t be able to catch up to from behind.

But there were plenty ahead, hunting them and those
simply assaulting the city. It took several more hours and three more
skirmishes until they got to the forest edge, with two of them injured but
still moving. Now with no one to protect they could fight as a unit and had
kept themselves alive despite several hundred Hobbits worth of kills. It was
mind blowing how many the
enemy
had in play, but that
seemed to be their MO in this invasion. They weren’t better on the ground than
Star Force, certainly not in terms of infantry, but they were making up for it
and then some with sheer numbers…and orbit was no exception. If not for the
Sentinels holding them at bay this planet would long ago have been theirs.

That said, this piece of it looked to already be
theirs, or at least in the transition stage. Waiting just inside the tree line
the commandos spread out and scouted out the view ahead. The forest ran right
up to the city, but the engineers had cut it back for a radius of nearly a
kilometer to accommodate new growth and to give the perimeter defenses decent
firing lines.
 

That was good for the city, but not for them. As they
looked out with their own eyes in addition to the battlemap they saw several
Skarron walkers in that gap, none too close but nearly within firing range…but
at the moment one of them was getting picked to death by a trio of mechs making
an ambush run, coming out from inside the city…with a fourth heading out into
an infantry pool entering through a breach in the city wall and laying waste to
them by the dozens per second.

Another walker to their left began to crawl its way
towards that mech, trying to get within firing range.

Suddenly a waypoint materialized on Rio’s HUD with a
ping, ping,
ping
sound indicating that they had to go
now. Trusting in it
he
and the other commandos ran out
from cover and sprinted towards a point some 100 meters out from the mech and
in the gap between it and the walker heading their way…and now he could see a
second behind it coming around the curve of the city wall as well.

“Wedge up!” one of the commandos said, prompting them
to adjust their formation into an arrow that would give each of them a clear
firing line straight ahead. The wounded two fell in behind that arrow and kept
up as best they could but they were lagging behind. One of the others went back
with them, keeping some cohesion in their formation as it stretched out into a
much longer line.

Rio and the first few kept pressing hard, heading for
a group of Hobbits that finally noticed them coming that were running away from
the mech. It took a couple of minutes for them to get to each other, but when
they did the commandos were faced with a shower of white plasma orbs, which
they returned fire on with their own more accurate blue streaks…and a few white
orbs of their own from captured enemy weapons.

The commando arrow cut through them, with the flanking
edges downing more Hobbits as they passed through and wounded several Skarrons,
clearing a narrow tunnel through them that the wounded pair and their escort slipped
through, adding weaponsfire of their own. In front of Rio the mech suddenly
abandoned its slaughter on the right and cut hard left, coming across the
commandos and helping to clear a path as it took the first hits from the Type-4
now coming into range.

The neo didn’t bother shooting back at it, saving its
weaponry for the infantry and playing big brother to the commandos as they
sprinted towards a specific point on the wall. When they got close a small
anti-infantry battery opened up and shot down a few hobbits with plasma fire as
a car-sized portal opened up on the city exterior and allowed them access.

Rio ran up to that point but didn’t go in, turning
around and circling back to make sure the others got in…just in time to see one
of them get cut in half by a plasma blast from the Skarron walker. The white
glare was so bright and intense that it seared through the commando’s
midsection, with his legs and head toppling to the ground as separate pieces in
the steam-laced explosion from where the rest of the plasma hit the wet surface.

Recklessly ignoring it he stepped out a few strides
and fired at the nearest Hobbits as the wounded pair finally caught up. When
they were within a few meters he finally retreated, seeing the mech doing the
same and running across the now smoldering grass, kicking and stepping on
several Hobbits and even a Skarron that didn’t move out of the way fast enough.
It roasted a few with its maulers then Rio lost sight of it as he dashed inside
and out of the firing line.

When the last of them came through the blast doors
shut on their own accord, but there was no one on the other side.

His helmet came alive with a transmission that was
going out to all of the now 10 commandos. The Archon wasn’t with them, but
another’s ID tag popped up with the comm, and this was one a ranger.

“Welcome back, but unfortunately your day is just
starting. I’m in the city’s command nexus and remotely controlling as many
functions as I can. The section of the city you’re standing in has been
evacuated and is currently under Skarron control. You’re going to have to fight
your way through and I’ll guide you as much as I can, but several areas have
already gone dark. I think the enemy is learning how to cut our feeds. Head
here,” he said, with a waypoint popping up on the city map, “and I’ll get back
to you. Not many dropships left, so hurry.”

“You hear that?” one of the other commandos asked.

“Yeah,” Rio responded. “Let’s go.”

By the time they got to the waypoint Rio had a hole in
his armor, right chest under his armpit that was spitting fire through his body
with every move. Between the cauterizing nature of the plasma and the medical
gel laced into the armor’s inner layer his blood loss was kept to a minimum,
but every time he twisted while running the crunchy layer of burnt skin and
scabby clotted blood would crack and seep even more, enough that the right side
of his white armor down to about his knee now had dark red streaks.

The Skarrons knew they were in their backfield now and
were cycling troops back from pushing further through the city to get at them.
They’d had two big firefights, the second of
which
they’d
been pinned down for more than 15 minutes before they broke free…but they
hadn’t lost anyone else, though several more were chewed up like Rio was, one
with a shin wound that caused him to run with a limp that couldn’t keep him
with the others.

Fortunately they didn’t have the luxury of moving very
fast. They had to be methodical, covering every corner they came to as if it
might contain an ambush and that allowed him to keep up without slowing the
others down. When they got to the waypoint the door to the armory opened up
remotely and they filed inside, with Rio about to hit the close button to shut
them in but the door did
so on
its own as the ranger’s
voice popped up on the comm again.

“Armor up.
I can give you
maybe 40 minutes to get to the LZ. I don’t think we can hold out longer than
that. I’m going to have to abandon this position in the next 5 minutes or so.
I’m transmitting the best route I know,
then
you’re
going to be on your own. Be warned, they’re massing ahead of you. You’re going
to have to run and gun and not get pinned down. I wish I had better news for
you but this is where we’re at. We’ll hold the LZ as long as possible, but I’ve
already ordered the mechs to start pulling back and our air cover isn’t going
to hold out much longer. Run fast, shoot straight, and be the badasses I know
you are. We’ll be waiting.”

Rio didn’t waste time listening to the message
standing still. As soon as he heard ‘armor up’ he began pulling off his damaged
armor and grabbing a generic version out of storage. He had to make several
adjustments to the pieces in order to get a decent fit but that didn’t matter.
It was fresh armor with fully intact shield emitters. He also grabbed several
weapons and ammo containers, including some Kiritas style grenades and trigger.

There was no food with them in the chamber, nor had
they any left to bring with them, but at the moment that didn’t matter much.
Ambrosia would have helped almost immediately, but by the time they’d digested
much of anything their window of opportunity would have been lost. They had to
fight their way through to the LZ on what energy reserves they had left.