Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (9 page)

The empty slot was on the ‘head’ of the neo, which was
just a small lump that held a modular slot that hadn’t been filled with a
weapon. The two mauler cannons in his arms were the primaries though, not to
mention the hands on the mech, which could now grip things like they were his
own. That sort of dexterity was worth using the crude mental interface, as was
the running speed.

When he got into the clear he sped up, but not as fast
as he was capable of for the light blue mechs behind him were piloted by
regulars who could not use the mental interface yet. In the future it would be
able to access a person’s mind, but right now most of
Iden’s
access was him using his telepathy and the regulars didn’t have that or any
other psionics.

The two neos were using the harness controls that
Iden’s
mech also contained but that he hadn’t deployed. His
‘harness’ was just to hold his body still while his mind expanded out into the
machine, allowing him to stride in a way that no computer could ever hope to
match, giving him the fastest mech on the field.

There were other Archons out there, but none of the
other strikers were in them, leaving him top dog…amongst the Jinxes at least.

There were a lot of other Clans operating out there,
but as far as his Clan’s mechs keeping up with him were concerned, he had to
ride the brake a bit to keep them in formation behind him. That formation right
now was a line, with the other 8 mechs just covering ground behind him as they
raced toward a pair of
voltrons
in the distance that
were getting hammered by green plasma and quite a few pink phaser beams.

It seemed the lizards had upgraded their tanks with
the new weapon as well.

“Two ravens per neo,”
Iden
ordered, mentally tagging the two ‘chicken walkers’ he wanted on his wings.
“Stay fairly close to each other, but operate in kill trios and take some of
the heat off those Ninja Monkeys.”

Iden
signaled the two
monster mechs and let them know that support was coming, then he got a request
from the starboard one barely a second later. He looked ahead on his battlemap
and saw some huge new tanks that were packing a beefy version of the phaser, making
the scene look something like an old Godzilla movie. Those big tanks were far
in the back, with the smaller ones swarming up to the
voltrons
’
feet where a few dozen other Ninja Monkey mechs were hacking them to bits.

“Damn that’s a lot of tanks,”
Iden
whispered off comm. There was no way he could get to the big ones without going
through the little ones…nor did he have the long range weaponry needed to snipe
them, though the
voltrons
were doing a decent job of
that. There were just so many of them, and more were coming up in the distance.
If they didn’t knock this group down now, there would be so many piling up here
that they couldn’t suffer that multitude of weaponsfire, for their dominance
relied on giving their shields a chance to recharge. Throw a lot of fire on
them and they’d be reduced to taking armor damage.

They had to split them up and keep them in manageable
numbers, and the lizards looked like they understood that fact too and were
spamming them without holding anything back, ground or air.

As
Iden’s
shoulder
sammy
hit and downed a wisp in
front of him the craft careened into the ground at his feet, causing him to
jump up and to the right. He had the presence of mind to retract the
sammy
with a thought before his
neo hit head first on the ground…but thanks to the interface he was actually
able to roll the machine through a somersault and crawl back up onto his feet.

“Nice dodge,” one of his ravens said as they passed
him by, slowing a bit until he got back up to speed. He popped the turret back
out and let it get to work, then accelerated up into a full run, leaving the
ravens in his dust.

“Follow me in and pick up the pieces,”
Iden
said, actually managing a sprint in the mech, which
was something that only a select few had ever achieved. He came up even with
the
voltrons
and their defending mechs and punched on
past them, skipping a few of the lizard tanks and diving into the sea of them
until he ran out of running room.

Then, with a boost from his jump jets, he leapt into
the air as if he was doing the long jump and came down on his target mech
further ahead, bending his left elbow and driving it down into the top of the
yellow/tan machine and crumpling its weapon cupola on top, killing the crew
inside as he drove the parts down into the interior as he pancaked the vehicle.

Laying on his belly on top of it,
Iden
popped up the mauler cannon on his right wrist and fired at the nearest tank as
he crawled his way back to his feet, with the ravens doubling up on his target
as they finally came back within range.

9

April 17, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kajit
stood perched atop one
of the buildings in firebase 3, his two clawed feet latched on to the edge of a
stubby spire along with a host of other Lacvamat situated on his left, right,
and behind him, cluttering the rooftop so to keep the ground clear for the
walking troops as they waited.
Kajit
was watching the
battlemap inside his helmet and the assault taking place on a colony several
hundred miles to the north. The area in between them and it had been fought
over and largely destroyed in the past weeks, but so far the Lacvamat had not
been allowed to participate in the assault.

That was supposed to change today, and right now a
Clan unit was attacking the colony from the rear while mainline troops were
doing most of the fighting out front and working their way into the lizard
city. It too had an orbital defense battery, but the Clans weren’t going for it
this time, rather they were sneaking in and trying to take down the small scale
anti-air defenses first so the Lacvamat could join in on the assault.

As it was, the war to conquer the planet was going
Star Force’s way…yet slowly. The planet was huge and nearly a third of its
landmasses were covered in lizard structures, meaning there were a lot of them
to kill. Orbit had been secured and the Sentinels orbiting directly above the
ring of firebases were a welcome presence, but a lizard relief fleet had
arrived only three days ago and done considerable damage to Star Force’s
remaining drones before being defeated. Most of the lizard ships had been
hunted down and destroyed before they could flee the system, but there was no
way to know when the next group would get here.

Kajit
couldn’t worry about
that, for it was a naval matter and he was fairly sure they wouldn’t see lizard
cruisers in atmosphere aiding the ground troops anytime soon, though that was
always a lingering threat. With the lizard naval assistance out of the question
Star Force was creeping its way across the planet, taking down more of the
orbital bombardment capability as they went, but in order to get to it they had
to take the colony first or conduct a solid raid into it, meaning the ground
troops had to fight through the worst defenses the lizards could throw at them
before Star Force’s naval power could be applied.

That sucked, but there was no way around it. The
ground army needed the Lacvamat involved, but the anti-air defenses that were
holding the fighters back would also be effective against the flyers, and they
were a lot less protected given their small size. There were encountering so much
resistance from the lizards, however, that a change in tactics had been made to
hit the anti-air batteries first so they could bring in the flying infantry
support.

That’s what
Kajit
was
waiting on. The battlemap had giant no-go zones around the firebase where they
weren’t permitted to fly, and right now it was better to keep the airspace
overhead clear for dropships and larger transports to bring supplies down from
the recent cargo convoy. A lot of heavy equipment plus foodstuffs and ammo were
flowing to the surface, so the Lacvamat simply sat on the rooftops in full
armor and waited for the go ahead.

When the anti-air turrets would go down was not a
thing that could be predicted, so
Kajit
spent the
better part of 5 hours sitting and waiting before the giant red box over that
colony disappeared. When it did he had to wait all of three seconds before the
transit order was given, then Lacvamat all around him began to leap into the
air and flap their armored wings to gain altitude, staggering themselves so they
didn’t run into one another.

Kajit
waited until he found
a gap then took off, using his small anti-
grav
jump
pack to help him get airborne. He could fly under his own power, but the armor
that he and the others wore made it difficult, for every part of their bodies,
from their two feet to their thin, fleshy wings were covered in flexible, yet
hard plates that weighed them down. It was a workout to move in them, but the
anti-
grav
compensated for that with a light, constant
lift during flight or a short burst of altitude such as now with the device
adding to the leg kick that sent him skyward.

The Lacvamat didn’t waste any time circling above and
moved off towards the north in a long column. A few hundred miles was a
workout, but nothing that would exhaust them. Had this unit been Human,
Calavari, or any of the other
groundpounders
they
would have had to be transported by dropship to the battle site, but the
Lacvamat didn’t have that handicap. They’d fly there on their own, and do so at
considerable speed once they flapped their way into a high enough altitude to
begin a shallow dive and use the air resistance to launch themselves even
further ahead.

As such the long column looked like a series of waves
heading up and down, but with each repetition they gained speed, using the
anti-
grav
units to do most of the climbing and
sparing them the fatigue. Alongside the 5,500 Lacvamat were a couple of
squadrons of skeets flying escort to make sure the lizard fighters that were
still roaming the planet in swarms didn’t try to ambush the flying infantry.
Kajit
and the others could fight them fairly well, but it
wouldn’t take much of a hit to knock them out of the air and Star Force didn’t
like personnel being treated as expendable.

Kajit
assumed that was why
it had taken the trailblazers so long to call them into combat, waiting for the
right moment when they could put their skills to use without facing the
unavoidable loss of personnel. Lacvamat combat within Star Force was still in
its infancy, but it had been laid out plainly to them that they were not the
heavy hitters in a ground fight, but rather the support. That wasn’t due to
lack of skill, but rather the differences in biology. If
Kajit
landed on the ground he was not going to be able to fight hand to hand well, especially
since he didn’t have any hands.

He had trained to make some use of himself if he ever
found himself in that situation, but the Lacvamat were meant to stay in the air
at all times and offer fire support to ground infantry units, which was why
when he and the others finally arrived at their waypoint just outside the
colony under assault they broke up into smaller units and went into a
flock-wide holding pattern just behind the four
Hoth
-class walkers bombarding the
city buildings with cleansing beams.

Soon a slew of dots popped up on the battlemap
throughout the city, with one in particular being highlighted. That was where
he was supposed to go first, and along with 7 others he flew up about twice the
height of the hoths and broke away from the mass of Lacvamat as about half of
them also clustered up into groups and headed different directions.
Kajit
made sure to stay below the designated ceiling where
the skeets were operating, for they didn’t want anyone to die from a needless
head on collision while the aerial fighters were keeping what was left of the
wisps off them.

Kajit
activated his armor’s
shields and biased
them
95% to the underside, trusting
in their air cover to keep the lizard fighters busy and their topsides safe.
That allowed him to better protect his wide profile from the ground view, for
the wings on the Lacvamat were necessarily huge in order to lift their body
masses and made for easy targets when spread wide.

Speed was their best defense, but having a thick
shield matrix underneath their wings helped greatly. If he or the others took
any armor damage it was a signal to turn tail and run immediately, for the thin
layer covering their wings couldn’t stand up to much pounding due to the weight
issues. They simply couldn’t armor themselves like the Calavari could, so most
of their defense had to be shunted to the shields and evasion.

Kajit
pinged in his approach
and linked up with the ground unit they were tasked with assisting, getting
revised targets and suggested approach vectors. He and the others split up
further, conversing amongst themselves as how to organize this, then the
Lacvamat turned the corner around one of the taller lizard buildings and
suddenly they were looking down on a large firefight between a sea of lizards
on the streets and a few clumps of mainline Human troops.

There were no tanks or mechs on either side, just
infantry, which made
Kajit
cringe at their numbers
but also salivate at so many exposed targets…from the air anyway. They’d
erected a lot of barricades on the streets, but the waiting pools flooding
across the streets and into the buildings, or rather out of them, were just
standing in the
Lacvamat’s
firing arcs.

The trick here was not to get shot down, for so many
plasma orbs fired skyward would almost undoubtedly hit him, if only through
sheer accident. To counter that he picked up speed and angled for a low
approach, charging his own plasma weapons that were located along the inside of
his legs, as well as the secondary array that ran up his chest. Those concealed
hatches opened, revealing an ice cube tray of slots, each of which slowly
filled with a potent blue plasma orb.

The two rifles on his legs also powered up, then when
he swooped over the target coordinates given to him via the battlemap he fired
them off onto that location in two blue streaks, then released the cluster bomb
directly over top of it as he passed by. The tiny blue orbs went sideways a bit
into a dispersal pattern to cover an area rather than hit a pinpoint target,
then exploded out like bombs when they hit. After that
Kajit
fired his leg weapons twice more each as he buzzed the lizard troops, then came
to the end of their crowd a moment later, turning the corner and putting a
building between him and their hasty return fire that was too slow to target
him.

Another target pinged on his battlemap, in
approximately the same location, and he circled around the buildings to come at
them from a different angle. Meanwhile the other 7 Lacvamat in his group were
doing the same, with the ground troops feeding
them
targets as quickly as they could hit them. He hit his second one, then a third
before he noticed at a glance that a Knight wedge had used one of their soft
spots in the flood of lizards to press a barricade and physically push it
aside. Now they were moving out into the larger group of enemy infantry, hiding
behind their overlapping physical shields as they led a column of Regulars
through the breach point.

Kajit
circled around and
made another strafing run, never knowing how many he killed for he was flying
past them so fast he couldn’t look back to see the damage he was doing with the
array on his chest, but he could catch a glimpse of his leg rifles when he
angled them forward onto targets he was just coming up on.

After that last flyby he received a different request
that had him circling around another building and flying back over Star Force
troops that were pushing their way towards the breach point.
Kajit
came down to street level, landing on a bit of clear
pavement as the Regulars nearby parted to give him room, not wanting to be
caught up in his wings, but he neatly tucked them into two vertical fins
bracketing his head as he landed.

There he waited a few moments before an Archon ran up
beside him and climbed on his back. The green-armored warrior was heavy, but
with full power applied to his anti-
grav
Kajit
was able to get them both up off the ground with some
very heavy and fast wing flaps. He had to maintain that heavy cadence to keep
them moving while reducing the anti-
grav
down to a
sustainable level, else the capacitor would empty and he’d have no assistance
whatsoever for the few seconds it took to recharge.

The Archon sent a waypoint to
Kajit’s
battlemap, not even bothering to say a word of thanks for the ride. That wasn’t
rude, but rather a reality of how Star Force fought and the intensity of the
current battle. They were both here to do a job, and the less distractions they
had the better.

Fortunately
Kajit
didn’t
have to fly far, for the Archon wanted dropped off on the other side of the
lizards so he could flank them. He took him around by a safer route rather than
flying directly over the horde, then came to a stall over the ground, tipping
his back end down and allowing the Archon to slide off without interfering with
his wing flap.

As soon as he was free,
Kajit
took off heading to another of the communal attack points given that he hadn’t
received any more specific targets. He landed several more plasma attacks
directly over the lizards before their formation eventually broke and they
began to retreat…not to escape the enemy, but to fall back into more favorable
points for ambushes and other means to kill the Human troops.

Kajit
took it on his own
volition to fly in low and attack some of those isolated lizards, even coming
down so low that he grabbed one of them by the back of the neck with both of
his feet and dragged him into the air half a meter before firing one of his leg
rifles directly into his head. He dropped the corpse and banked hard right,
using his anti-
grav
heavily as he tucked his wings to
avoid his left from running into the side of the building on the narrow street.