Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (5 page)

“Copy that,” the Calavari said, rechecking his weapon
status. They were all good to go, save for the missile box that had long since
been depleted. He followed one of the other mechs as it sped up into a
mechanical jog, with the trio making better speed through the cluttered streets
and having to step over sporadic debris, either from wisps, ruined buildings,
or occasionally Star Force equipment, for this area had seen heavy fighting
previously.

Which made it all the more ironic that another tunnel
entrance was located here. The lizards must have been saving this one and Star
Force had completely missed it the first time through.

When they eventually arrived at the spot all they saw
was an intersection with a waypoint on it, but then the road suddenly broke
apart geometrically and rose up on pivot points like an opening flower, exposing
a ramp that led below ground into a tunnel. The trailblazer hopped off his
mech’s shoulder and began to free fly on her own beside them, with the Calavari
bringing up his mech’s shields again as they walked down into the dim tunnel
that only had two narrow strips of illumination running along either side of
the ceiling.

The gap between walls was large, allowing two of the
mechs to walk side by side with ease and
Cvog
brought
his up alongside
Garavat’s
as a new waypoint was
added. They trekked towards it, descending several more ramps and taking two
multiple fork intersections to the right until their battlemap showed a huge
chamber inside of which a single Star Force icon was located, which also had a
trailblazer tag.

The little firefly that was Kara zipped on past and
entered ahead of them, ducking to the size a few meters and hovering near the
wall as the big orange war machines entered and opened fire on the nearest
tanks…that didn’t even swivel their turrets towards them.
 
Some further behind them did and fired off
pink phaser streaks that had far more intensity and duration than the wisps
did, but they met the mech shields and did not penetrate with the first few
shots.

The maulers that the mechs returned fire with did far
more damage to the tanks, and with each one that they killed one more lizard
tank behind them would suddenly stop firing and freeze up, with
Cvog
knowing that was the Archons using their magical
psionics.

This lot of lizards was going to take some chewing to
get through, but with not one, but two trailblazers to assist them he had no
doubt that they’d be able to succeed in destroying them all. The only real
question was how much more damage their mechs would take in the process.

5

July 14, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Larissa stood in the center of an enormous underground
bunker, looking up from the floor to see racks upon racks of wisp docks
stretching out from the walls in a latticework of space-saving designs. There
were open airways between them to allow for mass movement, but the 30 story
tall room was definitely designed to allow for very compact storage and quick
release, with tunnels connecting to the surface appearing on the ceiling in
multiple places.

The racks were empty now, for all the lizard fighters
in this colony had been destroyed and were now laying in pieces around the cityscape.
As far as Larissa knew the purge of the locals had been completed two days ago,
but there were so many nooks and crannies for survivors to hide in that she didn’t
consider anywhere on the planet outside of the Star Force firebases to be truly
safe.

After a good day of rest the trailblazer had come back
out here to have a look around as survey teams were continuing to map the
underground chambers, often having to use very powerful sensor equipment
brought below ground to circumvent the dampening layer in order to find new
tunnels whose entrances hadn’t yet been discovered. There were hundreds of
independent systems, some like this one having been burrowed more than 2 miles
below ground. The lizards were notorious for developing subsurface structures,
but they’d never gone to this extent with a surface city overtop.

Normally their robust underground facilities were
camouflaged on the surface, with little or no infrastructure above. This colony
clearly wasn’t one of those cases, and unlike the others these subsurface
facilities weren’t all interconnected, making it clear to Larissa that they had
been built for one purpose and one purpose only.

To confront, confound, and ambush an invasion army.

If one tunnel system was discovered the others
wouldn’t be exposed, allowing the mass of lizards below ground to operate with
virtual impunity until all of their hideaways were rooted out. In this case
that hadn’t happened, for the mass of them had come out to ambush the Bsidd
army conquering the city. Had she had a command ship directly overhead in orbit
they probably could have detected the tunnels with an intense sensor scan, or
at least they could now that they knew what to look for, but with the orbital
defense guns the lizards had developed there was no way to get a ship into that
low of an orbit to do the scan…and that meant there was no way of knowing how
many more of the lizard colonies on the planet had this sort of ambush
infrastructure in them.

It was time to launch two more attacks, but the
trailblazers were holding off on those and finishing up the ones currently in
play while they studied this colony in depth, not wanting to risk another
surprise until they had some answers here. A Mainline/Clan reinforcement fleet
was on its way to help solidify their hold on orbit, for two days ago another
lizard fleet had shown up and had to be beaten off. They’d killed a few drones
in the process, and if they kept whittling down their numbers they’d be at risk
of allowing ships to get to ground, and that was unacceptable.

The lizards weren’t going to reclaim orbit though, not
with two Sentinels holding pieces of it, but the risk was in allowing lizard
cruisers to get in-atmosphere and directly attack ground troops. Star Force
held naval superiority, and that was the only reasonable way that they were
going to be able to conquer this planet, for the majority of it still lay in
lizard hands. That would take a lot more killing and equipment loss to
accomplish, and Larissa didn’t expect to leave this planet for more than a
year, possibly longer if more surprises were waiting for them.

Other empires wouldn’t mind just spamming troops and
overrunning the enemy, which was difficult with a spammer like the lizards, but
Star Force wasn’t going to send anyone into battle assuming that they were
going to die. Loss of equipment was one thing, but loss of life was completely
unacceptable. Larissa had lost over 70,000 Bsidd to the ambush in this colony,
and she was going to take her time now to avoid walking into another such
debacle again.

And that time right now was being spent wandering
around the captured colony, looking at what the lizards had built and how
they’d used it, all the while just thinking things through while others dealt
with security sweeps and debris removal.

Larissa sensed the mind approaching from her left
before she ever saw the dark blue armor, and kept her eye line on the racks
above as Liam jogged over to her position. If something had been wrong he would
have
commed
her immediately.

The trailblazer in command of the Calavari on this
mission decelerated to a smooth stop beside her left should and looked up in
the same direction she was. “Ingenious little bastards, aren’t they?”

“What’s
new.
”

“Them not trying this in other locations.”

“We don’t know that for sure yet,” Larissa said,
finally looking at his faceplate.

“It’s not part of the planetary design, and there were
no partially constructed bunkers like this in the colonies that we’ve already
taken.”

“Are we even sure about that? Some of the smaller ones
we could have completely missed.”

“I’ve been having the Calavari do some double checks.
Nothing has turned up as yet.”

“And?”

“I think this was a test.”

Larissa raised an eyebrow. “Of what, exactly?”

“What it would take to kill us. They lost a huge
amount of troops, but now they have data to analyze and how many they have to
throw, against the Bsidd at least, in order to overwhelm our shielding and
armor advantage.”

“A little late in the game for that.”

“They’ve never been able to take away our orbital
bombardment capability before.”

“Point.”

“I think they’re going to be even more devious now
that they don’t have to duck and cover like they have in the past. And once they
get these defense batteries widespread, we’re going to have a hell of a time
taking planets…at least ones with a full grid like this. We’re going to have to
hit them while there are still sections of the surface accessible to landing
craft and knock out the guns via ground assault. If we wait and let them fully
turtle up we’re going to be burning through drones like crazy making entry
corridors.”

“Welcome to the new age,” she said dryly. “Was there
something in particular you wanted, or were you just roaming the area and felt
like stopping in for a chat?”

“Need some space?”

“No…I didn’t mean it like that. I’m alright. I just
hate losing people.”

“Ditto, but we have to keep pressing on. The lizards
are growing new troops and building more wisps by the minute. We can’t be
reckless, but the invasion has to keep moving forward.”

“No, we need to catch our breath and figure this out
before we hit another target.”

“What are we missing?”

Larissa sighed. “I don’t know. This is too drastic a
change. I admit, the lizards have always been inventive, but we’re seeing a
slew of new technologies and techniques. These aren’t the same lizards we’re
used to dealing with.”

“Actually, if they’d continued to let us dominate them
that
would have been out of
character.”

“Something has changed, and until we get a feel for it
I don’t think we should press forward with any amount of pace. That damn sensor
dampener is going to cause more problems than we’ve encountered already.”

“This may have been a test of it as well,” Liam noted.
“To see if we could detect the boundary walls and chambers like this.”

“And with their interstellar transmitters currently
out of reach they’ve no doubt been feeding that data back to the rest of their
empire. Damn it.”

Liam looked at her, but didn’t say anything more.

“Alright, point taken. But we have to find a way to
detect the boundary walls if there are any more of them out there.”

Liam pulled a small device out of the pack on his back
and set it on the floor. A moment later a series of holograms sprung up around
them with the trailblazer using a telepathic interlink to make adjustments on
the
buttonless
little white disc. The three images
moved out to form a circle around the device, with Larissa and Liam making up
two of the five points around the circumference.

“She back with us?” Morgan’s full body image asked
Liam.

“
Yeeessss
,” Larissa answered
for him, annoyed more with herself than anything. Hesitancy wasn’t an Archon
trait.

“I’ve been on site for the past 6 hours,” Kian said
from Larissa’s left on the impromptu little Jedi council ring. “I’ve been
taking point blank sensor readings and I cannot detect a subsurface wall ring,
nor any dead zones. Even if they have the full setup within this colony,
without the wall they can’t pin us there and we’ll have the option of retreat.”

“And the fighter swarms?”

“I’ve got most of the mods on the Axius mechs
reconfigured to anti-air, so if they try the same trick again they’re not going
to have so easy a go at it. That said, I think we should proceed a bit more
cautiously in the coming days. I want to double up with the Bsidd on this one.”

“Calavari are doubling up with Mainline,” Morgan
pointed out. “It’ll take a lot longer to knock colonies off the list, but it’ll
take a lot more of an ambush to overwhelm us if they do have any more
blindsides coming our way.”

“Agreed,” Larissa said, pushing aside her past
worries. There’d be plenty of time for thinking going forward, and if the
lizards were using a new playbook it was best to read a few more pages of it.
“But let’s start with a few probing attacks before we mass into the city.”

“Allow me,” Conner insisted. “If Liam or one of you
can take my assault list, I can have Canderous split up and play vanguard for
all future hits. Their drone mechs and fighters are a good stick to poke the
lizards with, and they certainly don’t mind going in first.”

“Not a bad idea,” Morgan mentioned, “but the lizards
waited a long time before springing the trap. They might just wait out the
probes.”

Liam raised a finger, prompting everyone else to stop
talking, for they knew his mannerisms well enough to recognize he had just come
up with a new idea. “Morgan, how deep are those sensor dampening plates
located?”

“Mostly just below ground level. The techs have found
a few deeper below the largest buildings. They’re speculating that those were
added after construction rather than during.”

“What if we have the Canderous mechs escort a remote
drilling unit, either attached to a mech or something
independent,
that
can break through that shell and stick a conventional sensor probe
underneath? If the plating is all more or less at the same depth, we should be
able to get a peek at what’s underground.”

“That’ll take an awfully big transmitter to penetrate
the surrounding structures,” Larissa pointed out.

“Yeah, but that could work,” Connor said, thinking
hard. “We’d have to cannibalize a naval drone, but we’ve already got
reclamation equipment here that can be converted to digging purposes. Patch in
the sensor array and we’ve got a short range trap detector.”

“Might have to sink it down in a few locations to
cover the entire city,” Kian added, “but I like the idea.”

“And we can use it to bait the lizards out if we bring
it in to search for the wall rings...wait, never mind. We can just use a low
flying drone for that if we don’t care about being stealthy.”

“Are the walls sensor
stealthed
laterally or just on the caps?” Larissa asked Morgan.

“Just the caps, but even then they can’t hide against
that close of a scan at that magnitude of power. I think the lizards designed
them to fool orbit scans, not anything down on the surface.”

“Fighters?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan wavered. “We only have one wall
to work with, and we can’t rebury it to find out. Until we detect another one
this is all just guesswork, aside from the subsurface bunkers.”

“We’ll need a calibration run to determine how many
drill points we need before we send Canderous in,” Liam added.

“How do Kara’s sensors stack up?” Connor wondered.

Morgan shook her head. “The advanced design can’t compensate
for her lack of power. Already had her try and it didn’t work.”

“Are we holding back the Clan strike teams, or still
sending them in first to hit priority targets?” Kian asked, looking at Larissa.

“I’d say simultaneously, otherwise the Canderous units
might draw too much attention.”

“If we do the sensor sweeps and the colonies come up
clean, do we still want to double up on targets?” Liam asked.

“Yes,” Larissa said firmly, then raised a hand to
dismiss any thoughts of her still being gun shy. “There still might be new
surprises in store for us, so let’s just pull back a little and lay the hammer
down hard until we see their full basket of tricks. After that, which will
probably be the end of this planetary invasion, we can get more economical with
our troop deployments…what?”

“I agree,” Liam said, “but I’m still waiting on the
day when the lizards start building their cities with bombs and just destroy
them when whenever we put troops inside. The larger force we use to take them
the greater incentive that will be.”

Connor sighed. “That would fit right in their
playbook.”

“I don’t think so,” Morgan differed. “While I admit
they certainly could do that, it…oh, damn.”

“Yeah,” Connor agreed, seeing the same thought process
that had just gone through his mind go through Morgan’s. “Exactly.”