Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (8 page)

Iden knew she and Sonya were wearing the heavy armor
varieties that their ranks afforded them, but they were still pushing the
limits in order to take out those big guns, which he knew the lizards wouldn’t
hesitate to fire into their own people in order to kill even one of the
Archons.

As that pair leapfrogged across the 7 turrets in total
Iden and the others pushed their way through, with a lot of the standard
variety lizards just jumping on them and grabbing for their weapons, arms,
legs, or whatever other handholds they could get to drag them to a stop so the
others could shoot them, but with the group battlemeld linked they could see it
all coming and used a lot of impressive hand to hand combos and their psionic
kin to intercept or knock away the grapples. Part way through they pushed out
their formation and formed a small opening inside that Sonya and Chrissie
jumped into, their armor ugly with melt marks and the padawan with a slight
catch in her left arm movement where the elbow joint was no longer swinging
smoothly.

With the turrets gone all that was left was a football
field-sized area full of lizard infantry. Getting beat up by the occasion
phaser hits and the physical contact draining shields whenever they started to
regenerate, the 10 man Archon team slugged their way across, killing a lot but
with even more lizards piling into the underground road behind them as they
came down from street level. This was the biggest spamming effort Iden had ever
personally seen, and he was glad they’d decided to bring a full 10 Archons, for
any less and he doubted they could have made their way across without enough
armored bodies to soak up all the incoming damage.

A telepathic signal from Sonya told them not to use
their Fornax, for the lizard bodies around them were also a shield against the
others, so Iden stopped throwing out any such attacks laterally and used his
Lachka and limbs to fight off those nearest him. All he had to worry about was
the two meters to his left, for he had an Archon in front of him, beside him on
the right, and one behind him, giving the striker the ability to focus on his
little part of the armored turtle and avoid taking hits from all around, though
is left arm and hip were getting pretty chewed up.

To counter that he switched with the striker to his
right in an awkward transition, but that left both of their highest damaged
areas facing each other and buying them more longevity throughout what felt
like an eternity of shuffled steps moving forward. Eventually Sonya gave them
the heads up and launched Chrissie forward like a bomb, with her landing in the
midst of those ahead and toppling them to the ground twitching from a Fornax
field.

As a group the other Archons ran over them, with
Chrissie and now Sonya throwing Fornax blasts out ahead to keep those lizards
down while avoiding disabling their own people. Iden and the others fanned out,
jumping over the tightly packed fallen bodies and throwing their own Fornax
blasts into them and helping each other with telekinetic lifts, including one
from Sonya that pulled Iden up midair into a hail of phaser fire and over the
last knot of them, but landed him on a small patch of clear tunnel ahead.

He twirled about, punching the nearest lizard to him
and shooting the next as the other Archons reached the semi-clear area and were
able to start fighting their way forward at a jog, doubling up on targets and
getting some momentum into their formation. Half a minute later they were all
but in the clear, with them all accelerating into a high run with the
master/apprentice pair taking the lead and scouting out any hazards while
planning their underground route back to the city perimeter.

All Iden had to do was keep up and follow the group,
while keeping an eye on their rear and the swarm of slower lizards trying to
chase after them.

8

February 11, 2756

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Karen shot through the air like a guided missile,
landing foot first into a lizard with a rocket launcher and knocking him back, throwing
off what would have been a shot into the cluster of Calavari going hand to hand
with a horde of lizards blocking the narrow gap in the rocky ridge. As soon as
the Archon’s body hit the ground the
Bataf
link to
Travis ended and she bounced on her hip, rolling to a knee and keeping some of
her momentum as she sprang to her feet in one fluid motion, detonating a Fornax
field that took down the other half dozen lizards around her with only one of
them managing to get a shot off into her black armor.

Her shields caught the pink
blib
as she brought her rifle to bear and shot the downed lizards, then she reached
a hand back over the edge of the ridge and leaned the opposite direction,
reestablishing the
Bataf
and connecting herself to
her brother with another
repulsor
conduit, yanking
him up to her and getting both of them high above the battling armies throwing
down in the forest north of the current target colony.

Unlike previous assaults, the lizards hadn’t waited to
fight within the city boundaries, instead choosing to come out and into the
forest to fight Star Force as they began to hack away at the perimeter turrets.
A combination of tanks, wisps, and rocket carrying infantry had hurt the mechs
badly on the narrow, treeless approaches, forcing them back with only the six
hoths still in play at range, but even those were getting hit hard by
wisp
clouds that were funneling in from two other nearby
colonies. More than half the planet was now in Star Force hands, or rather had
been removed from lizard ownership as the invading forces hit and moved on, not
putting down any roots aside from a handful of firebases.

Deconstruction of those sites would occur later, with
the current priority being the removal of the enemy troops. Once again the
lizards were being devious, with the Calavari assaulting the colony having to
fight through the forest in order to get to the city’s edge, for it protected
them against tanks and aircraft alike, though on several occasions a rain of
phaser fire had punched through the canopy on precise locations, strafing the
Star Force troops before being beaten back, either by mobile anti-air units the
Calavari were carrying or a handful of mechs that were tromping their way
through the trees and making some very long roads to get in closer.

The wisp cloud defending the colony was keeping Star
Force air cover away, but it wasn’t so thick that they could be reckless with
their numbers. Aside from a few brave strafing runs on the infantry beneath the
green/black leafed trees they were staying back over their own buildings and
reaching out in several tendrils to hit the hoths that were continuing to snipe
the perimeter turrets from range, though they were having to find inventive
spots to establish line of sight given the hilly terrain.

With some of the turrets taken down already the
infantry had an open door to get into the buildings and return to the normal
street fighting that this invasion had grown accustomed to, but the lizards
weren’t going to have it and were saturating the hills with troops. Virtually
all of them were standard variants, for maulers were next to useless against
armored Calavari, but the one that Karen had just kicked out of firing its
rocket had been a mauler, with the muscular variant having been repurposed into
a heavy weapons carrier.

There were more of them popping up almost at random,
and while they were typically going after tanks or a lucky aircraft hit, they’d
begun using them to shoot clusters of infantry the past two days, with this
current pass through one jaggedly cut hillside seeing the most resistance of
any location. Karen knew there were tunnels carved into the hills, for she had
already spotted two entrances, suggesting that this hadn’t been a last gasp
effort on the part of the lizards to keep Star Force out. It was another
planned tactic, though this city did not have any boundary walls traps. That
said, the landscape worked almost as well to keep people in or out.

Until the wisp dome over the city was removed they had
to be careful not to get surrounded, for there was no way of knowing how many
of these small tunnels there were, or how far out they reached short of flying
a drone warship up and scanning the hills further. The one they’d sent to check
for a buried wall had had a hell of a time getting close enough without rising
up too high passing over the hills to come within range of the defense tower
that was still operational, not to mention those in the nearby colonies that
could double up firepower if a ship rose high enough.

With the initial Clan insertion having failed, the
main Calavari force had been brought up to join them in a more conventional
assault…that had turned unconventional quickly, forcing them to fight in these
hills with the lizards able to move around far more easily given their smaller
size and, mostly, because of their tunnels. The Calavari couldn’t fit inside
them, and from the reports going around in the other locations across the 12
mile wide front, the Clan infantry couldn’t either unless they got down and
crawled on their hands and knees.

Karen suspected that was deliberate, for the lizards
moved around on all fours as easily as they did biped, meaning they could
reposition across the battlefield far easier than even she and her brother
could, allowing them to flank and ambush to their hearts’ content, which was
making this battle such a pain in the ass that an Arc Knight team had been sent
in to assist, with Karen and Travis coming with.

Those six Knights were down below, split up into
threes and both working their way towards the choke point, cleaning out the
flanks on the Star Force side from where they knew there were concealed tunnel
entrances. They’d help the Calavari secure the area and press on through, but
it was up to the twins to sniff out any surprises in the gap itself.

To that end they both ran through the trees along the top
edge of the ridge, making sure not to fall off the corroded hillside that was
already giving way. The portion exposed to sunlight was full of bushes and
other plants eating up every available ray, and inside of that there were
multiple lizards sniping down on the Calavari or waiting to do so when they had
an opportunity. The trees below offered some cover, but there were plenty of
deadfalls that Karen would have bet the lizards had cut down previously to give
them firing lines on anyone approaching the gap.

With their greeting party now dead, the two strikers
ran together along the edge using their psionics to detect the lizard minds
hidden in the brush even before their Pefbar could make them out amongst all
the jumble of branches and vines. Battlemeld linked, the pair had no trouble
picking them up one by one and chucking them over the side. Whether they died
on impact or were merely wounded upon landing they didn’t care. They were
getting them out of sniping position and giving the Calavari some easy kills
while keeping their own noise to a minimum as they made their way towards their
mission objective.

They’d come up the hillside/cliff pretty far away,
giving them some cover while the lizard units were split between the gap and
the creek bed further to the southeast. That was much heavier guarded, with
numerous concealed turrets to bust up mechs trying to use the waterway to walk
through. A fight was going on there, but a cautious one, with several Clan teams
trying to pick off the turrets to allow their mechs and the
Calavari’s
to get through once they got up to them. Any on approach within 5 kilometers
were getting a wisp greeting, so the fighting was designed to take down the
ground defenses before they sent the mechs into harm’s way.

There were over a dozen other locations that the
Calavari and Clans were trying to make their way through, with this gash being
the smallest. Some loner units had scaled the hillside already and were making
light probes into the area beyond the lizard defensive line, but those were
quickly being forced back through sheer numbers of infantry. Each of those
forays did get a little bit more battlemap information for the entire army to
use, with one tunnel location ahead having been spotted previously and marked
for the twins to avoid.

They could feel minds moving around deep underground,
but how many was unknown due to the depth involved. Putting a few to sleep just
to mess with them, Karen and Travis swung wide of the tunnel entrance, sensing
a few waiting there in the bushes to secure the location and ambush anyone who
came close…which would then be followed up by a flood of the scaly infantry
spilling out.

They didn’t want that now, so they bypassed them by
jumping up into the trees and going the slow route, branch to branch.
Fortunately the forest was large enough to get them up more than 10 meters, and
it was the thick upper branches that were protecting them from aerial fire that
also allowed them to hop between trees, made all the easier with their
psionics. A combination of climbing, jumping, and lifting each other got the
pair past the tunnel entrance, then they dropped back down to the forest floor
and kept moving cautiously but at speed, knowing the Arc Knights would add that
extra something special to break through the bottleneck below in short order.

It didn’t take long to get within Ikrid range of the
lizards lining the gap, and there were hundreds of them spread out along either
side up top and even more within what were probably carved out hideaways within
the narrow V-shaped crack that ran probably better than 300 meters at its steepest,
but with nearly a half mile of full stretch from flat forest floor to the same
on the other side.

It was a kill zone for sure, but it wasn’t the lizards
that the twins were looking for.

They crept as close as they could get before there
were too many minds around them, so they jumped back up into the trees and
gradually got their Pefbar range close enough to see their half of the gap, or
at least their piece of their half.

Damn it
,
Travis told his sister telepathically as they both crouched on separate
branches emanating from the same two meter wide trunk,
they do have explosives
.

And plenty of
live bait to conceal them
, she added, seeing the boxes buried just inside
the dirt/stone on the inner edge of the ‘V’ in a way that they could bury
anyone passing through.
I don’t see any
landlines. Must be remote activated.

That’s bad.

When in doubt,
ask for help
, Karen said, using both her and her brother’s psionic strength
in unison through their battlemeld to access the lizard minds nearest them and
start rifling them for information. The first 20 or so didn’t have any
knowledge about the explosives buried beneath their feet, but finally they
found one that did, but he didn’t have the trigger.

Or…
Travis
suggested, with her knowing exactly what he was thinking before he could say
it.

I don’t think
they have a detonate button on them
, she said, bringing her Pefbar back to
the location of the meter-wide block buried about 80 meters ahead of them and
to the lower left, just shy of one of the concealed bunkers on the inside of
the gap, but with enough rock and soil around it to blow out like shrapnel when
it did go up.

If we get closer
maybe we can disable it and not worry about a trigger.

Good call
,
Karen said, immediately beginning to hop to the next branch then, setting
herself, she lifted Travis telekinetically over to the nearby tree, adding a
repulsor
conduit to supplement her Lachka. Travis landed
across a fair sized gap then returned the favor, helping his sister across and
the two of them began moving slower and slower, keeping as quiet as they could
until they were directly over the heads of three lizards hunkered down behind
knee-high wall segments hidden within bushes that they could snipe from and
hide in when the Calavari eventually got to the trench below.

Travis kept a mental eye on their minds, ready to
freeze or distract them if necessary while Karen reached down into the ground with
her Pefbar getting a better view of the explosive and looking for something to
mess with. She took a moment to be careful and consider her options, but the
sounds of the firefight just a few hundred meters away and the lizard
troops
running back through the gap in retreat underscored
just how little time they had.

Warn them off.
This is going to take some time, plus we don’t know how many of them there are
,
she said, using her telekinesis to pull apart a wire from its connection on the
buried device.

She felt Travis smile, then abandoned her sabotage
effort as her brother jumped down from the tree and she followed, landing next
to the mind-frozen lizards as both of them abandoned their subtlety and
sprinted along the edge, drawing attention and numerous lizards out of their
hiding spots on the flats above the gap. One concealed tunnel entrance opened
up and a line of lizards began pouring out but the twins ignored them, heading
for a specific bunker on the other side of the gap and nearly a quarter mile
down it, almost dead center in the entire giant booby trap.

Going for pure speed, they didn’t fire any shots nor
bother to disrupt the lizards other than with a few hasty psionics. They were
standing on top of a giant minefield and had to get to the middle bunker now,
else risk the whole thing blowing up underneath them. They figured that
wouldn’t happen until the Calavari got at least partially inside, which was
prompting their recklessness.