Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64) (4 page)

Unfortunately they weren’t able to handle it cleanly,
for after another twenty minutes of fighting one of the other attack groups
lost a tank in the final stages that didn’t just go out of commission, but it
was blown apart by repetitive attacks that were more vengeance than tactical.
It was the last gasp of the Tangos on that part of the battlefield before they
retreated, leaving the now smoking and motionless remains of the Skarron walker
behind like a giant statue memorializing their defeat.

The other groups, now free to turn their few remaining
rail gun slugs on the surrounding tanks, made quick work of those that
lingered, with about 20% of the counterattacking forces pulling out
successfully. Brayden had lost some 42% of his equipment, with tanks down all
across the burning plains, but it was that one vehicle that had got pounded
repetitively after it was down that he lost two people in. The rest of his
mercs
were able to be pulled out, and while some were
seriously injured they would all survive save for that unfortunate pair.

He knew this was war, but that didn’t mean there had
to be a lack of honor. Once the tank was down it was no longer a threat, and
the same was true of the Tango’s tanks that he was now ordering his people to
search for survivors, calling in his fighters to scare off what was left of the
enemy’s now that the walker was out of order while a number of shuttles came in
with search and rescue personnel, both to attend to their own wounded as well
as take captives.

Brayden eventually popped the hatch on his tank and
went out on foot to help safe the enemy craft and recover their pilots. He was
angry at having lost two of his men, but he wasn’t going to take out that
frustration on these pilots, otherwise he’d be just as bad as them…though a
part of him wanted to, just to even things up.

He knew that others might be feeling the same way, so
he sent a
comm
message out reiterating standing
orders just as he got a signal from his own controller, indicating that there
was an approaching dropship coming in from the southwest.

A Star Force dropship.

Brayden tagged another of his infantry to replace him
in the search and recovery efforts and looked up into the sky, seeing the all
familiar silver silhouette gleaming in the sunlight as it flew down towards the
surface about a kilometer off. It didn’t land though, merely hovering over the
ground briefly and dropping a pair of armored troops out the side hatch to land
about three meters down, then it took off again and disappeared up into the
sky.

Brayden wished his armor had Star Force
comm
protocols, for he was used to being able to see who
was who at a glance, but these two sets of armor had no ID, though he knew they
were transmitting constantly. His equipment just couldn’t pick up the cloaked
signals.

His eyes did catch the armor make as he got closer,
with him realizing that it was Archon armor. What they were doing all the way
out here he wasn’t sure, but assumed it had to do with the Skarron walker. They
probably wanted to know where it had come from too, but a part of Brayden was
surprised they cared to respond given how far away from Star Force territory
this was.

But that wasn’t what took his breath away, for when he
got close enough for his mind to register colors he realized that the armor
wasn’t green and black, as his eyes had guessed looking through the smoke
trails. It was brown and dark blue.

That meant a padawan and a mage, two sets of armor
that he’d never laid eyes on before that designated their highest ranks. Having
one of them here was mindboggling, but two…that was inconceivable.

Brayden didn’t know what was going on, but this
mission had just taken a turn, probably for the worst. While an Archon was
always a welcome sight, where they went there was usually trouble.

And a padawan and mage meant
a lot
of trouble.

4

Jenna saw one of the Marauders wave to them and jogged
over to his position with Levi following a step behind. In the distance the
dead walker stood smoking, though the thin trails coming off it were
insignificant compared to the amount of smoke coming from the grass. Huge
patches of it had already burnt off, leaving the ground she was running across
now being little more than black char coated with the occasional bit of debris.
Larger tank remnants were spread around, obviously the source of the small
bits, and she could sense minds still inside some of them.

“Archon,” the Marauder greeted them when they met up.
“I’m surprised you came.”

“We were in the area,” Jenna answered. “Which one of
you is Brayden?”

“I am.”

“Situation report.”

“The locals are losing, badly. It’s not a complete
rout, but cities are falling without any real hope of holding out. We still don’t
know who these guys are or what they want, and the few prisoners we’ve taken
haven’t been forthcoming. We’re fighting here on contract, but I don’t expect
this to be the winning side when all is said and done.”

“There are still men in some of those tanks,” Jenna
pointed out.

“We know. I’ve got teams going around and pulling them
out. I had planned on interrogating them, but now that you’re here, would you
mind?”

“Have you searched the walker?”

“Not yet. We took it down from range, so I haven’t had
any units in close yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s dead.”

Jenna glanced at Levi and he took off running in the
direction of the Skarron war machine.

“How many ships did you come with?” Brayden asked.

“We’re not getting involved in the fighting until we
know what’s going on,” Jenna cautioned. “For all I know this planet had this
coming.”

“We sent records.”

“We got them.”

“Then I don’t understand the hesitancy. The Marauders
have no affiliation here other than a small outpost, but it’s clear that this
is the type of predation that Star Force routinely stops.”

“Star Force also has a habit of taking planets from
others,” Jenna pointed out. “And we don’t do it for pay.”

“We only take defensive assignments,” Brayden said
defensively, sensing the rebuke in her tone.

“We’ve currently got the lizards on the defensive. You
going to chip in and help them out too?” she asked, taking a couple steps past
his shoulder and pointing. “Get whoever is in that tank out and I’ll see if I
can get some answers for both of us.”

Brayden followed her armored finger with his eyes and
saw the wreckage of one of the Tangos’ tanks about 300 meters off. “Easy
enough,” he said, getting on the
comm
and calling his
units with cutting tools and medics to him.

Levi accelerated gradually, passing through a flame
wall about 100 meters away from Jenna with the tiny plasma flares barely
tickling his shields. They did interfere with his vision of the ground ahead,
so he switched on his Pefbar and was suddenly able to see through the smoke and
flames as he finally got up to his normal cruising speed. Both the armor he
wore and Jenna’s were the light variety, now reduced down in size so much that
they appeared to be little more than thick wetsuits over the moving portions.
The solid plates were downsized as well, making for a very fast, agile armor
that the pair favored.

He wore a slim pack on his back with a handful of
supplies, over top of which a weapon rack held a rifle, a pair of pistols, and
an ammo pouch. That was standard gear for ‘social’ calls, and would be amped up
considerably if any heavy fighting was expected. The extra weight slowed him
down a bit, but he’d been running and fighting in armor like this for so long
that the bulk on his back almost felt like a third limb by now.

Crossing the distance over to the walker in a blur of
moving legs and pumping arms, Levi scanned ahead with his Ikrid, not trusting
that the deadly machine was truly out of order. When he got close enough he
picked up a single mind remaining, but by the time he got to one of the massive
legs the contact winked out, with Levi assuming that one of the crew had been
barely hanging onto life and had just now succumbed.

That meant there was no one inside to get to open the
door, so when he drifted to a stop underneath he circled around the walker,
getting a view of the damage to all sides, then picked his spot and dropped to
the ground, gathering his legs underneath him. He triggered his
Yetu
, extending his legs out in a jump that was amplified
by the momentary surge in muscle speed. That sent him shooting skyward without
the help of his armor halfway up the walker’s leg.

Levi grabbed hold of a joint, gluing himself to the
side with a tiny telepathic order to the armor that activated the magical grip
points in the hands and toes, giving him a
spiderman
-like
grip even on flat surfaces. He had to move
slow
, and
some materials were less agreeable than others, but he was able to climb up the
leg and then onto the bottom half of the giant sphere, using weapons damage for
grip when able. He scaled it to the point where there was a man-sized hole,
then climbed in through the short tunnel that a rail gun slug had carved out.

There was a mess of chewed up machinery, but he was
able to wiggle his way into the crew compartment where he found a slew of body
parts from races that he couldn’t identify. There were two more or less intact
corpses in uniform, but the rest was a blood-splattered death cocoon with
multiple access points to the exterior light, indicating where the rail gun
rounds had entered from, one of which was imbedded in the sidewall, now a
squashed plug of metal rather than the pointy bullet it had originally been.

Levi pulled himself out of the damage-created shaft
and stood up, feet squishing on gore. A quick look around confirmed that the
control station that he was interested in was still intact, though there was a
lot of extra junk in the way. He walked across the body parts and climbed up on
the now twisted rigging that had allowed what looked like bipedal pilots to
operate a craft designed for the multi-armed quadrupeds that were the Skarrons.

The padawan ripped off a panel exposing the interior
components of part of the computer system, then pulled out a long, rectangular
component, disconnecting the three wires linking it to the auxiliary power and
comm
systems. Levi reached back and opened his pack,
sliding the salvage inside. He knew the techs back on the
Jor
-El
would be able to access the device, which would then give them
an itemized history of this walker. Where it had been, who it had been assigned
to, what damage it had taken, the sensor records surrounding that damage, and
anything else useful to the Skarrons in analyzing their defeats.

Star Force had known about the data nodules for some
time, and had made a habit of ripping them off the dead walkers when they
could, though it seemed that each one, no matter how large it was, only
contained a single nodule, making it a bit of a lottery as to whether it would
be destroyed by damage or not. Given how many walkers the Skarrons deployed in
the field, all it would take would be one nodule recovered to give them an idea
of what had happened in any given battle, so this one being intact was a stroke
of luck…in addition to the thick support beams it was located next to.

He knelt down near one of the more or less intact
bodies, examining the uniform and any other bits of detail available. These
obviously weren’t Skarrons, which ruled out one possibility that they’d been
considering. The
mercs
’ data had said they hadn’t
observed any Skarron or Hobbit presence, but Jenna and Levi had found it very
odd that the Skarrons would let anyone else use their walkers, especially since
they didn’t even let their own Hobbits operate them.

But it seemed they had here, or had they stolen a
walker from them? Too many possibilities to narrow down yet, but they could
scratch one off the list…and hopefully this nodule would give them a few
necessary tidbits to help unravel this mystery.

Levi spotted a sidearm loose on the floor and picked
it up, finding the trigger and shooting one of the torn up walls. A short burst
came out and melted into a panel, but it wasn’t plasma. He guessed it was a
lachar, and by the design and yield he guessed it was low on the tech tree.
Odd, given how advanced a war machine these dead guys had been piloting, yet
they were carrying primitive personal weapons?

That suggested a hodgepodge grouping, and from the
look of the body parts lying around, there were at least three different races
present in the walker, all of which he was unfamiliar with, though it was
difficult to say for sure about the third, given that he was having to mentally
piece it back together.

Levi took another glance around, finding nothing else
of interest, then he jumped up to the top of the chamber, grabbing hold of a
different bit of damage and climbing out through a much larger gash that led him
to a door-sized hole high up. He skittishly walked out to the edge, unsure of
his footing and being wary that it might slide out from under him at any
moment, falling apart.

With a thought he activated the powered setting on his
armor and took a step out onto the curved hull, sliding down a few meters
quickly and then transitioning into freefall. He braced his legs and caught
them against the ground, pushing hard and having the armor do most of the work
in lieu of the jump pack he didn’t have. His feet dug into the ground several
inches as he dropped to a knee, bleeding off his momentum before standing back
up and beginning his return run towards the cluster of
merc
tanks on the horizon.

The tank pilot that Jenna had tagged for recovery had
lost a hand and was unconscious when they pried him out of the pinched cockpit
that had been dented inward from a rail gun slug deflection. The Marauder medic
had quickly sealed off the wound to keep any additional bleeding from
occurring, but we wasn’t about to inject him with any supplicant without
knowing his biology. It was quite possible that this one was going to die
simply from the loss of blood, but as the medics ran their tests to determine
what he could or couldn’t take Jenna slipped off one of her armor’s gloves and
pressed her small, pale fingers against the ridged forehead of the
orange-skinned biped, using the physical contact to amplify her Ikrid link.

There was a mess of pain and recent memories to sift
through, made all the more murky by the unconscious state he was in and her
unfamiliarity with this race, but she took her time and sorted through what she
could, gradually finding some points of recognition and working from there. It
took more than ten minutes before she finally got a name, followed by a bit of
additional information before the
Tanzghi’s
mind
disappeared along with his life.

“He’s dead,” she said to the medics who were readying
an injection. Jenna turned to face Brayden as she slipped her glove back on and
locked it into her wrist plate. “This one belongs to a war party called
something I can’t pronounce, but loosely I’d tag them as the
Tipring
.”

“War party?”

“Neither army nor
mercs
,
they’re recruiting from their populations in time of need. This one has been
involved for a lot of years, and it seems to think that whatever they’re doing
is to protect their homes. Conquer or be conquered, though with a few wrinkles
that I couldn’t quite iron out. Anyway, the
Tipring
are part of a coalition that’s on some sort of quest. Please tell me some of
the others are still alive?”

“I’ve got reports of four captives recovered, but
they’re all in bad condition. One has already died, at his own hands.”

“Lovely,” Jenna said, reaching out with her Ikrid to
scan at maximum range. It took a moment to weed out the
merc
minds, but she was able to spot two more anomalous ones within bits of
wreckage. “I can sense two more.”

“Where?”

“There,” she said, pointing to half a tank more than a
quarter mile off, “and…never mind. That’s one of yours,” Jenna corrected as one
of the search team members pulled out of a wrecked tank and walked off empty
handed.

“Near death?” Brayden asked.

“I can’t tell this far away.”

“Let’s get on it,” the Colonel said to the scattering
of
mercs
standing around the pair, who immediate
broke up and got moving now that they had a task assigned. Brayden went with
them, but Jenna lagged behind as she felt Levi approaching. A minute later his
running form broke through a smoke cloud and came into view, coasting to a stop
alongside her dark blue armor.

“Anything?”

“Crew is dead, and they’re definitely not Skarron. I
did find a nodule. Looks intact.”

“Good.”

“You?”

“Not much. My date died before we could get very far.”

“There’s
gotta
be more left
around here.”

“A few. The
mercs
are
pulling another one out now, but so far they’re all in bad shape. We may have
to go on a little field trip of our own later.”

“Why wait?”

“I don’t like
mercs
, and I
want to get a feel for these guys as much as the Varshoo.”

“Got a name then?”

“Yeah,” she said, sending him a brief telepathic
summary of what she’d learned.

“Curious,” Levi mewed.

“What?”

“Something about the way they decorated the interior
of the walker,” he explained, sending her a telepathic image of what he’d seen.