Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (6 page)

“I don’t think they have the yields for that,” Kian
differed. “And even if they go piecemeal their own buildings are going to block
a lot of the damage. They can’t kill all of our troops with a trap like that,
and I think they’d start with a kamikaze bomb tank or wisp before they tried
anything on that scale.”

“Well those two caveats are lovely in and of
themselves,” Connor commented.

“Could we do it?” Morgan wondered.

“I don’t know,” Liam said, thinking hard. “Certainly
not the most economical way of destroying a colony. It also depends on how
strong the buildings are. Ours can stand up to a lot more than the lizards’
can. Most effective way would be a kinetic impact, but you can’t do that from
inside…unless you had an asteroid in orbit and just called it down, but you’d
lose the surprise effect and give time for the ground troops to evacuate.”

“Scale it down then. What if we booby-trapped
individual buildings with our biggest bombs?”

“We could,” Liam agreed. “And to a lesser extent I
think the lizards could too. If they ever go that route…”

“We start leading with all drone mech and even
infantry units,” Larissa said, pointing out the obvious countermeasure.

“Or just blast them from orbit like normal,” Connor
added.

“That’s probably why we haven’t seen that tactic yet,”
Liam pointed out. “But I wouldn’t put it past them at some point going forward
if we have to keep using ground assaults to disable orbital defenses.”

“Damn it,” Morgan’s hologram swore. “Other than taking
our chances, do we have any way of detecting bombs of that size prior to
launching an assault?”

“In theory, we should be able to scan inside buildings
so long as they aren’t sensor
stealthed
,” Liam said,
thinking a few steps ahead as he spoke. “A bomb of that size would be very
large, given lizard technology…”

“Which is improving,” Kian added.

“Granted, but you know as well as I do why starships
don’t have self-destructs. Too much mass to move around. Blowing up buildings
is no different, especially when you want to wreck several blocks at once. If
the lizards want to build that big of a bomb we should be able to see it from
orbit if we look closely. If they put it underground that will dampen the
blast. If they sensor shield an area we’re going to be careful of it
regardless.”

“So a sensor shield above the ground line?” Morgan
asked.

“Yeah, I’d say that’d be bomb bait. If they put one
below ground they could kill a fair number of our troops, but they couldn’t get
enough of them to be worth the effort. It’d have to be above ground.”

“Or in a cruiser they fly in kamikaze,” Larissa
wondered.

“We can stop or dampen those with mobile shield
generators,” Liam dismissed. “Have you guys seen many
det
packs recently?”

“Not really,” Morgan answered. “They’ve pretty much
given up on those attacks against infantry. I’ve seen a few try to grab a mech
leg and do damage, but our infantry just shoots them down from range.”

“Same,” Larissa agreed. “They’ve become very selective
in where they deploy them, probably because they can’t be sure to kill us with
a single blast given our armor strength nowadays.”

“Good,” Liam declared. “Let’s hope they stick with
that mindset. All the same, we need to start working on some defenses against a
larger implementation of that tactic if they choose to push it in that
direction.”

6

October 24, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Iden dashed through the forest and up to the clearing
surrounding the lizard colony that was their target along with 9 other Archons
from Clans Jinx, Sneaky Fox, Stark, and Vulcan. There was barely a strip of 50
meters separating the trees from the outermost buildings, but Iden suspected
that had been deliberate, for on scouting this colony they’d detected another
hidden underground wall buried beneath the trees ready to be sprung up at a
moment’s notice, trapping whatever Star Force troops were inside.

They assumed there were hidden bunkers underneath the
city that held more infantry, tanks, and wisps but that remained to be seen. It
had been decided to skip this colony and attack the others without the traps,
as they’d been doing for the past 3 months. All of those that they’d hit up
until now had been normal colonies, with this being the second ‘trap city’ as
they’d come to be called. Problem was, it had an orbital defense tower like all
the others, and if they wanted to be able to operate high altitude aircraft and
bring down transports anywhere in this area it had to go down along with its
neighbors.

Those were being taken down as the colonies fell one
by one to the seemingly inevitable march of Star Force troops across the
planet, but that slow march was going to be hindered even more so if they left
this orbital gun intact until the final days of the planetary assault. It’d
been decided to send a team in to take out the tower and the tower alone, then
leave the rest of the city to rot while they moved on to other targets. Trouble
was, with so many troops conceivably hidden inside waiting to be released, a
standard Clan assault to target the key structures was problematic.

Their solution was to send an Archon team in on foot
and exploit the vulnerability of having the forest that close to the perimeter,
which Iden now was as he sprinted across the gap and jumped up onto the wall,
sticking there for a moment then climbing up with no one else aware of his
presence other than his fellow wall-crawling Archons.

Sonya-837 and Chrissie-10398 had the lead on this
mission, being a master/apprentice pairing and bringing their experience and
unique psionic skills to bear while Iden and the others were strikers and
rangers. They were all carrying heavy packs with jump packs layered underneath,
making their transit a bit clunky, but destroying the tower with psionics alone
was almost impossible, hence the myriad of explosives that he and the others
were carrying.

Send a missile in and it’d get shot down by the
numerous anti-air turrets within the city. Carry their own version of
det
packs in on the backs of Archons that the lizard
infantry would have to counter and the odds increased greatly. That said, this strike
was incredibly bold.

Which Iden rather liked.

When he got to the rooftop he followed the pair from
Clan Vulcan at a running pace, crossing the wide building and jumping across
the street below to the next…and having to fall a couple of stories in the
process. He cushioned his fall with his jump pack easily enough and ran on,
with the other seven Archons doing likewise as they avoided the streets
entirely and pressed to get as far into the city as they could before being
spotted.

The little armored fleas had come in at night for just
that reason, and were able to hop across the cityscape with remarkable speed
until a patrolling wisp finally shot a pink blip down into the rooftop 12
meters away from Iden, blasting a small crater out of it and blowing up a pyre
of vaporized plating and water, for the recent rain was still puddled
everywhere.

A telepathic prompt from Sonya told everyone they were
headed indoors, with them altering their running direction as soon as the
Vulcans pulled the fighter down and into a nearby building with their psionics.
Once it was out of line of sight they broke away from their run to the next
building jump and swerved into a rooftop entrance, taking the stairwell that
led down into the building.

“Stay tight and focus on point defense,” Sonya told
them over the comm. “We’ll handle ranged targets.”

Doing as told, Iden pushed out his Ikrid and Pefbar to
cover the rooms closest to them, traveling behind a Clan Sneaky Fox ranger.
Most of the minds he came across were already unconscious by the time he sensed
them, with the lead pair knocking them out at range like she’d said. If they
missed one or couldn’t handle a large number of them then it’d be his and the
others’ job to take them down, either through Ikrid blackout or by shooting
them, but their mission wasn’t to kill lizards this time, it was to kill the
defense tower, so they couldn’t get distracted with firefights and had to keep
moving at all times.

For Archons that meant constant running, but that
wasn’t a challenge considering the kind of workouts Iden and the others did.
The mage and padawan weren’t moving too fast so he wasn’t having a problem
keeping up, but he knew that trouble was all around them and could be shoved
down their throats at any moment. The only way they were going to get where
they wanted to go was to not let the lizards zero in on their position and
stack bodies against them. That was the trick to this entire mission and why it
was so dicey.

It was certainly doable, but they couldn’t take a
frontal assault mentality. They had to be ghosts as often as they could, disengaging
more often than not and confusing the enemy as to which direction they were
headed. They couldn’t take a direct line to the tower or the lizards could
prepare for them and put so many infantry between them and the target that
there would be no way even a trailblazer could get through them all.

If that did happen, Iden had already been told that
they’d revert to secondary targets, taking out some anti-air towers or ground
defense turrets and try to pull the lizards attention back away from the
primary target. If that didn’t work they’d have to improvise, and pull out if
necessary. They weren’t going to risk another normal Clan assault to get the
towers, though the first one hadn’t triggered the traps until the mop up crew
had come in to fight the army within rather than hit the defenses. That was
probably to maximize the number of Star Force kills they could get, but now
that their secret had been revealed there was no guarantee they’d wait as long
at this location.

So this was going to be it, one way or another. If
they could sneak in and blow it, great. If not they’d work around the tower and
neutralize this city until the end…then pound it to rubble from orbit. A single
defense tower could do a lot of damage coupled with the city defense shield,
but it was the combination of overlapping defenses that gave this new lizard
tactic its true teeth. A command ship could probably take a tower 1v1, so if
they had to they’d wait and deal with it that way.

But they really needed the airspace clear to keep
hammering the surrounding colonies, so Iden and the others were determined to
make this work. They kept close, running a staggered two-wide formation with
each a step ahead of their buddy as they ran through corridors and down
stairwells, using some ladders where they had to, but avoiding all lifts that
could be computer overridden. The Archon team traveled all the way down into
the substructure and into the shallow tunnels that ran underneath the city
streets, allowing them to pass into another area without making themselves
visible.

The trail of sleeping lizards, however, was quite
obvious, so as soon as they found
a
empty area the
team disappeared, avoiding lizards rather than subduing them so they could
sneak off and keep the enemy confused. That took time, and Sonya made sure to
keep them heading away from the tower more often than not. That made the trek
across kilometers of city seem like Frodo’s hike to
Mordor
.
They stopped twice to rest, eat, and catch a bit of sleep, then after two days
of skulking around in the
undercity
they finally got
near the tower.

Which was where they ran into a brick wall, so to
speak. There were underground defense stations guarding the access routes into
the skyscraper-sized complex. The lizards might be stupid, but they weren’t
stupid
and knew that if a battle broke
out Star Force would be more than willing to undercut any surface defenses and
backdoor the big tower.

They
were
stupid for having subsurface access routes at all. They should have completely
sealed off the tower aside from a handful of access doors several meters thick.
Instead, there were large archways allowing road-like access inside…behind a
wall of gun turrets, barricades, and loads of infantry.

“We go up,” Sonya answered before anyone voiced the
question. “Quietly.”

Iden followed the mage on a short backtrack then up
above ground inside a nearby building. It wasn’t the closest, but a row back
from the tower that was smashed into the infrastructure. That did provide it
with some building blockers from lateral attack, but it also gave them jumping
access to the exterior if the shields were down.

He wasn’t sure how she was going to play this, but the
tower itself had a very robust defense shield covering its moderately armored
exterior. There were even sporadic anti-infantry turrets clustered around its
base and anti-air varieties higher up, but no window access for them to come in
at altitude. That meant only the street level access points were left, but
those, he knew from past Clan missions to destroy these beasts with mechs and
strike-level infantry pushes, had even more formidable defenses around the base
of the tower than they’d just seen beneath it.

He didn’t think they would be going in that way, but
then what was left? Climb up to the top and go in through the gun mechanism
itself?

Once on the dark roof and crouched down amongst the
limited urban terrain there, Iden saw Chrissie pull out a compact sniper rifle,
swinging out the front section on a midpoint hinge and snapping it into place.
She dialed down the intensity, then shot off a very thin
sammy
beam towards the tower. The beam disappeared to
his vision halfway there, and hopefully it wouldn’t draw too much attention
amongst the rest of the city’s night lights.

“Shield’s down,” the padawan confirmed, packing up the
weapon and returning it to her back rack.

“Target,” Sonya said, with a waypoint popping up on
Iden’s battlemap, bringing a rueful smile to his face. She’d tagged one of the
anti-infantry batteries five or six stories up from the ground, but considerably
below the anti-air variety. “I’ll come last and throw the rest of you. Chrissie
goes first and cuts an entry hole. If we can’t get in drop to the surface and
run like hell. We’ll rendezvous here.”

Another waypoint several buildings away popped up and
Iden’s helmet stored the marker for future use while diminishing its aura in
the rest of the map and giving him an easy toggle ‘find me’ visual button on
the left of his HUD.

“Let’s go,” the mage said, jumping out of her crouch
and running to the building’s edge where she leapt across to the next one.

Iden followed second to last, making the jump that was
just at the edge of his range on half a charge. He upped his jump pack’s anti-
grav
duration a bit more to be safe, landing on the far
roof and following the others across it to the far side where Sonya stopped
ahead of the others, knelt down on one knee, and extended a battlemeld link out
to everyone. While they all didn’t have the same psionics, especially the
rangers, they did all have the basic ability, which was one reason why they’d
been chosen for this mission.

Iden accepted the link from her and extended the
‘handshake’ to the others. Soon they were a 10-man mind with him having to numb
up his senses a bit to keep from overloading from all the shared stimuli. The rangers
had it worse than he did but this was something he’d practiced before, as most
of them had. Going beyond 10 was unusual, and holding a 10-man link for a long
period of time was just as rare.

They wouldn’t be needing it for long, Iden knew, with
him combining his Lachka with 6 of the others and using it to shove Chrissie
off the building as she ran up to the edge and jumped, using her pack, muscles,
and a
repulsor
conduit from Sonya to shoot her out
like a missile across the extra-long distance. Acting as one mind their timing
was perfect, and Sonya feathered the conduit enough to land her two meters
above the wall turret where she stuck on impact with her armor’s gloves and
boots, then she slid down a bit and began cutting into the weak armor around
the edges of the battery.

Iden couldn’t feel what she was thinking, for they’d
thrown her beyond their battlemeld range…but not beyond Sonya’s. It was weird,
because even though his link to Chrissie was gone he could still get a few
snippets relayed from the mage’s mind. Whether that was intentional or not he
didn’t know, but as soon as Chrissie landed the rest of them started going
across one by one at slightly staggered intervals, with the two rangers going
next and leaving the most psionically capable Archons for last.

Iden went 7th in line, feeling the push from behind
but unable to create a
repulsor
conduit because he
hadn’t yet learned that ability. He compensated by goosing his jump pack to
maximum and floated across the gap until he smacked the edge of the tower,
bouncing off it and only grabbing on with one hand. There was no leverage
whatsoever, but his fingers stuck to the wall and he thumped against it as his
body finally bled off the momentum of the bounce.