Star Force: Starchaser (SF69) (4 page)

“
Yet to defeat
the Li’vorkrachnika we must purge them from everywhere?
”

“
Therein lies
the essential problem
.”

“
To which you
have been addressing it in what manner?
”

“
We have
selected a region of territory and are seeking to deny the Li’vorkrachnika
access to it. A stepping stone, both to secure those allies within and to block
the spread of the enemy through the region. We detailed as much in the
information packet we sent out
.”

“
So you did. I
am curious to know if you have other avenues of assault
.”

“
We also have
roving fleets seeking out and destroying the smaller enemy incursions before
they can develop, as well as disrupting their shipping lanes as often as
possible
.”

“
You have the
tactics, but no master plan for victory?
”

“
One often
cannot see the conclusion to a fight when it has barely begun
.”

“
And it is often
the fights you cannot see the conclusion to that reckless races kill themselves
on
.”

“
We do not have
a choice in this one. The Li’vorkrachnika will be fought, either on our
timetable or theirs. Recklessness would be doing nothing
.”

“
Something
without purpose may still be wasteful. This enemy must be fought, but it has to
be fought wisely and by all those affected. You have already set the foundation
for such an alliance, and we will contribute to it so long as it remains
feasible. How, when, where, and what remain to be determined. Are you the sole
commander of your race?
”

“
I am
.”

“
Then on behalf
of mine we request a temporary territory allotment on one of your colony worlds
near the Li’vorkrachnika border. A shared world, and one that we will not
retain possession of indefinitely, but we will require a staging base to
operate out of. All we need is available landmass and safe passage through the
system. We’ll take care of the rest as we work out the dynamics of how to
battle this new enemy as a united front.
”

“
Request
granted. The
Yishmur
System should suit your needs.
Our planetary colony has an uninhabitable moon that may be breathable by your
standards. We have not yet put down contained infrastructure there. If it is
agreeable to your physiology I would cede it to you for the duration of this
war.
”

“
Whether the atmosphere
is breathable or not we shall make use of it. I will send a message and our
race will come immediately with the material to reshape it to our garrison
needs. Though this agreement is in its infancy I see no reason to delay. We are
of an accord then?
”

“
I sent out an
invitation for allies. You have responded. Accord concluded
.”

“
We take such
matters seriously, and expect no less of the Voku. Do not mistake alacrity for
insincerity.
”

“
We are of the
same mind
,” Cal-com assured the Preema.

“
That you are
,”
it said, bowing its head slightly. “
I
would ask that you take no offense, but I have an admission to make that many
would find disturbing.
”

Cal-com stared at him evenly, though confused. “
Offense at what?
”

“
Preema are
telepathic. I have been watching your mind and comparing your thoughts to your
words. You are genuine, and I needed to ascertain that before any accord could
be forged
.”

A thought flashed through Cal-com’s mind and the
Preema flinched in reaction.

“
Is this to be
standard practice?
” the Voku asked, trying to shunt all sensitive information
away from his surface thoughts as Paul had taught him to do.

“
Only when
duplicity is suspected. These Humans. They have powers that you do not?
”

“
I will grant
you the need to ascertain our intent, but I cannot allow you to pull secrets
from my mind…nor can I trust in your good will. I am not angered, but I have
responsibilities to maintain. From here on out our interactions will be
technological in nature
.”

“
As you wish
,”
the Preema said passively. “
I apologize
for the intrusion, but we had to be sure before committing our fleet regardless
of the alacrity needed
.”

“
Summon your
ships and build your staging base
,” Cal-com said, only allowing a few more
seconds before forcing himself to leave. “
And
while you are doing so we will compare lists of potential allies.
”

“
Agreed
,”
the Preema said, standing up and backing into the erect, plied armor that
quickly concealed its glowing visage. “
Thank
you for your understanding
.”

“
If I had the
ability I would have done the same
.”

“
And if I
didn’t, I would have been perturbed. We will take ourselves out of range and
meet only again in person at times of your request. And should we be on the
same battlefield simultaneously, we will not pry without just cause
,” it
said as the two escorts took flight first, then the Preema ambassador followed
with a hefty flap of its long wings that sent it shooting up high into the
atmosphere, ostensibly with an anti-
grav
component in
the armor.

Cal-com kept his mind frozen as if it were ice until
the Preema were out of sight, then he exchanged glances with his honor guard.

“
That I did not
expect
,” he admitted. “
We are going
to hold them to their word. They don’t come within physical proximity to me
again unless I invite them to do so
.”

“
What range do
you want?
” the Voku standing next to him asked.

“
Out of
sight…out of mind
,” he said, throwing one last glance into the sky before
walking off the platform and heading back to his transport.

4

August 2, 2825

Irten
System (Gamma
Region)

Ior

“Alright, ready for a headache,” Tom-008 said from the
back seat in a
Morpheus
-class mech as
it walked across the frozen tundra of
Ior’s
southern
ice cap.

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Victoria Jenson
said, not having a lick of psionic ability nor the full understanding of what
the trailblazer was about to do. She was a mechwarrior
Regular
and had been assigned to this research project along with her Clan leader for
reasons she didn’t entirely fathom, but he’d said it was important to both Clan
Skystrike and Star Force on the whole, so she’d eagerly accepted the mission
despite the live fire nature.

She was piloting the two seat mech from the front in
one of the manual control harnesses rather than using the mental interface,
which had her standing in front of Tom half naked and strapped into the rig but
just out of arms reach so she couldn’t clobber him in the head accidentally as
she swung her arms about. A lot of the regulars still weren’t as efficient with
the mind reading tech though most of the Archons now used the interface. Theirs
was more advanced because they could speak to the computer directly, whereas
everyone else simply had it monitoring their thoughts and reading impulses. The
system worked, but it wasn’t quite refined enough for Victoria’s tastes, so she
was going with the manual controls for this challenge in order to be in top
form.

They’d been working together in this tandem system for
months now but this was the first real test of Tom’s tech, whereas everything
else had been in computer simulation…and this time the danger was actual, with
the weapons they would be firing and being fired at with being the genuine deal
in order to gain an accurate analysis of effectiveness. Her job was to protect
Tom and do a little damage of her own when practical, making her big mech
essentially a football offensive lineman protecting their quarterback in this
upcoming game, though she and Tom were the only living players on the field.

“You’ll have to, because there’s no way I’m trusting
anyone else with this,” the trailblazer said, readying himself for the mental
overload to come. “Even with
Sav
, I’m going to barely
be able to keep up. Hit the ‘wake up’ button if you have to, because I’m
probably not going to notice where we are or what we’re doing…and if I do it’ll
be external.”

“I’ll keep us safe,” Victoria promised. “You just do
your thing like always.”

“Not like always,” Tom said regretfully.

“Meaning?”

“New unknown stimuli.”

“Right. So you don’t know how much of a headache
you’ve got coming?”

“Not really, no.”

“Pull down before you fry yourself.”

“You know Archons.”

“Exactly my point. If you’re the only one that can do
this, don’t want to set back the project while you veg.”

“Your concern is underwhelming.”

“Just trying not to flirt. Don’t want to get demoted,”
she said sarcastically.

“Compliment taken,” Tom said, sending a signal out
from the mech. “Get us moving. We’re live.”

Victoria twisted in her control harness and the big
biped mech took an awkward first step as it broke its standstill, but once she
had a bit of momentum she smoothed out the motion and began strolling across
the ice pack, sinking down an appreciable amount but nothing that was going to
trip her up.

As she did so Tom closed his eyes for a moment then
opened them again barely seeing the status displays before him as his mind was
flooded with information. He was linked directly into the onboard Nexus and
seeing through the weird ‘
overmind
’ perspective that
the technology afforded. He’d done this numerous times in naval training and
actual battle, but controlling ground units was much more difficult because you
had terrain involved. Space was empty, and with emptiness came lack of detail.

The detail of the ice pack, the ridges dotting the
immediate area, the atmosphere, the steps of the morpheus, and everything else
involved in the area flooded into his mind and he began filtering it for the
information he wanted, finding the four escort drone mechs standing behind them
and prompting them to catch up and form a box around the morpheus while he
likewise got the six huge
Leonardo
-class
heavy mechs underway. They were the replacement for the
Hoth
line and were the medium sized variety of the
hexped
walkers, with the smallest version being the Donatello and the larger two being
the Michelangelo and the Rafael.

A lot of the trailblazers hated to retire the Hoths,
both due to the nostalgic aspect and the amount of heavy modification that had
been made to them over the years. They were no longer the lumbering behemoths
that the first prototypes had been, but like the Star Wars machines that had
inspired the design they had a big weakness…and that was if they were flipped
over they were virtually impossible to right on their own. Adjustments had been
made to allow for a slow means of wiggling their way back over on top of their
collapsed legs, but the process was long and tedious and completely
unacceptable with the revised mandate going forward.

Another reason they’d been hesitant to replace them
was because they worked so well against the lizards, who had nothing in their
arsenal to tip them over with. That said, running the simulations against the
V’kit’no’sat was essentially a cow-tipping affair, and in light of that the
trailblazers knew they had to make a change and had decided sooner was better
than later. The new
hexpeds
had their legs set on a
ring around their turtle-shell like bodies with there being no top or bottom.
Both compressed halves were identical, so if the
leonardos
trailing the morpheus were knocked off their feet or even flipped over their
legs would just pivot around on their ball-like housings and stand the heavy
mech up again with the former underside now being the top.

That wasn’t going to be an issue today, because there
was nothing out on this ice shelf that could flip them, though it was possible
that the ice could collapse beneath their feet in some places that didn’t have
dirt a few meters down. That was a minor concern, for these six heavy walkers
were here simply as carriers, with Tom linking to them from his nexus and
causing their exterior doors to open.

His mind lit up with contacts and his
Sav
went to use consuming all the control signals from the
tiny craft inside as they began to spill out onto the ground in metallic
waterfalls on either side of the bottom halves of the headless walkers. When
they hit the ground they floated on tiny anti-
grav
cushions with Tom sending them out to wherever he wanted them, not through group
waypoint allotments but by controlling each individual
Spark
-class drone the same way he piloted a mech.

His head filled up with processing clutter, which his
well-trained mind sorted out with the help of the
Sav
.
He’d been pushing his limits over the past year trying to up his number of
simultaneous remote controlled units, but of the 20,000 units he’d brought with
him down to the surface he couldn’t handle more than 12,400 of them. The
remainder he ordered through group tactics into a holding pattern around the
leonardos
, knowing that their programming wouldn’t allow
them to fire unless they had a ‘manual’ command to do so.

That was standard Star Force protocol, for while they
used automated commands on naval vessels there was too much clutter on planets
for a computer to handle in the way of potential bystanders and the
trailblazers weren’t going to tolerate so much as one person being wounded in
an accident. Machines could only do what they were programmed to do, and there
was always a limit to that programming no matter how advanced. There had to be
a person at the controls to make sure weapons fired at the proper place at the
proper time, and that was why ground-based drones had never been used in
infantry applications.

It was true that a commando could have been linked to
an individual drone like the fleet controllers in naval engagements, but that
would have left far too few units in the field. A commando could kill hundreds
of lizards in person far more effectively than one of these little sparks, so
the only way this technology was going to be effective in large-scale battles
was if multiple units could be controlled by a single individual…and done so
without cutting corners and getting sloppy.

Tom still preferred using actual troops on the ground,
as did the other trailblazers, but with the number of booby traps the lizards
were setting up to try and kill even one Star Force soldier it was getting more
and more difficult to assault their worlds with zero deaths. Often they had to
pull back and sniff around with Archon scouts rather than diving in and kicking
ass as they’d prefer to do. When you didn’t have expendable troops you had to
fight in different ways, so the idea was to give Star Force some disposable
ground troops to send in and trigger traps or to reinforce units in distress
and have the machines take the brunt of the damage.

Despite all the advances they’d made in communications
there was still a detectable lag in transmissions coming down from orbit, even
if it was just over 50 miles. That would have been unnoticeable to most people,
but with the mental interface and Tom’s
Sav
he could
feel it, and when it’d been programmed into simulations he’d realized he needed
to be on site to circumvent that problem. If he didn’t have the lag to deal
with he could control more units, for everything that required him to think
even the slightest bit extra diminished his controlling ability.

Even now he was using cheats by assigning sparks into
small groups to fire on individual targets and a lot of other things that
helped spare his mind additional stress, but to have the sparks operate on
internal programming would mean mission failure so every movement they made had
to come from him and him alone, which sent his mental processing levels sky
high from the outset as he moved the swarms of little metallic spheres off
across the ice field and out ahead of the mech that he was riding in but barely
aware of in his
overmind
view.

He didn’t even realize Victoria was right in front of
him, for while his eyes saw her his mind was too occupied that he might as well
have been in the Bahamas and lying on a beach for all he knew. He was
completely disconnected from what was right in front of him, and even his own
body felt absent for the most part with his mind extending out through the
nexus and into the fighting machines, making them an extension of himself and
far more effective than mere programming could ever hope to be.

He saw hundreds of thousands of enemy contacts pop up
on the battlemap starting 4 kilometers ahead and gave Victoria a new waypoint
via the nexus controls, now unable to speak without dumping several hundred of
the sparks in the process. The
morpheus
adjusted their
track slightly to the right towards a rise rather than heading through the
shallow valley as planned. The other mechs and walkers followed them as
instructed in a short convoy while Tom sent the sparks out ahead and spread out
the leading elements into skirmisher teams that almost immediately came under
attack from concealed turrets.

Those turrets popped up through the ice, breaking the
natural camouflage and shooting at the sparks with the ‘phaser’ tech the
lizards now used along with a few rocket turrets. Tom felt the sparks get hit
as if they were a part of his own body and moved the skirmisher teams around,
firing the limited weapons each one of them had. One spark was the size of a
jacuzzi, making it small enough to push its way through all but the thickest of
forest, but the anti-
grav
took up more than 40% of
the interior space in order to give it full time flight capability. Using mechs
with legs saved so much space and power that Star Force preferred using walking
machines, but in order to keep the mental processing power down they needed
simple hovering tech on the sparks, not to mention the advantages that gave
them with rough terrain.

Had Tom tried to mentally walk 200 units he’d have
been overloaded, and driving the same number of walkers on their own
programming meant they could potentially step on someone without him
knowing…which was totally unacceptable. They had to float, but the tradeoff
meant they had less internal space to utilize on other systems like weapons. A
good chunk of their weight also came from armor and shields, leaving only a
small cluster of plasma emitters linked to a single power source for each spark
to fight with.

That meant they were ill suited for taking down
turrets, but the vast majority of the targets ahead of him were infantry-class
drones meant to simulate lizards with a phase rifle or rocket launcher. They
were all little tanks with the appropriate weaponry and no defenses save for a
bit of armor, but small enough that they took up no more room than a standard
variant lizard did, meaning they could swarm you in a very small area just as
the real enemy could.

Mixed in with them were tanks, also similar in size
and make to the lizard varieties. Those along with the infantry bots were being
controlled by Humans in orbit, meaning that if their internal programming
failed in some way they wouldn’t let Tom exploit it, making adjustments as
necessary but otherwise letting the little bots fight and swarm according to
known lizard tactics.