Star Force: Starchaser (SF69) (5 page)

And like lizards they had booby traps arrayed before
them, with one of the skirmisher bots being taken out with an explosive
detonation below the ice pack. It sent a huge plume of steam up into the air
marking the position visually for Victoria to see, but from Tom’s perspective
one of his many appendages was lost, though he could see the steam as well
through all the little sensor eyes he now had.

Those sensors were minimal, as was the
comm
systems in order to keep the sparks small enough to be
effective and not the equivalent of warships in atmosphere. He knew that
increased their ability to be hacked or jammed by an opponent, but the lizards
weren’t going to be doing that and these were just the prototypes. Besides, one
couldn’t have a drone that did everything, so Tom had had to make a choice as
to what specific role he wanted these for…and that had been anti-infantry and
scouting missions.

The tanks and turrets ahead of them were going to make
him pay for that design limitation, but he had five mechs and 6 heavy walkers
to compensate, meaning he wasn’t going to just sit in the rear and direct the
battle. Victoria was going to have to fight in it while he rode piggyback
inside the cockpit.

That was where the danger came in, and if necessary he
could cancel the entire exercise on a whim, but he needed to know how these
sparks worked in actual combat short of using an invasion of a lizard world as
a test bed. That would have been stupid for a number of reasons, but Tom also
wasn’t going to use the lizards as research targets. They may have been enemies
seeking to slaughter everyone else in the galaxy, but they were people too and
he was going to treat them and everyone else with a measure of respect
regardless of whether or not they reciprocated. If he had to kill them it’d be
quick and efficient…and because they chose not to take the out he’d give them,
either through retreat or surrender.

And likewise the little bots on the horizon weren’t
going to hesitate to try and kill the mech he was in. Star Force rarely used
live fire exercises, but with his mental finger on the kill switch Tom knew it
was worth the risk. They had to really fight to see how this would play out,
then they could build better simulations going forward.

To that end he linked with the leading
leonardo
and had it target the nearest turret and fire the
small, clear Keema beam weapon that it carried over range, blowing apart the
armored casing and killing the stubby raised bunker with a single, precise hit.

5

When Tom sent the order to fire the weapon he
subsequently lost control of 12 sparks, reacquiring them a split second later
and realizing he was already maxing out. There was no way he was going to be
able to fight with this many so he dialed back and released 600 to automated
functions, giving them a waypoint back to the walkers where they’d join in the
nonfighting formation with the others. He’d pull units up from that pool as he
lost others, but as soon as the heavy fighting started his mental processing
power was going to be even more taxed and he didn’t want to go into it already
stressed to the snapping point.

The ‘snapping point’ typically occurred in one of two
ways. The first was what had just happened, his mind would release sparks to
keep the others functioning properly and units would just drop off his mental
map. The second was that all his controlling functions would lag and he’d get
sloppy, not fully seeing them or what they were doing and losing the crisp,
reflex-like synergy he had with the machines now. That was the worse option and
he’d been training himself into a habit of letting units go rather than
degrading his entire army, but the numbers were off today.

He should have been able to control this many units
without too much difficulty. The sustained neural interface would give him the
headaches due to prolonged activity, but the simulations he’d run had him
handling this number of sparks before with reliable accuracy, else he wouldn’t
have grabbed so many of them right off. For some reason reality was diminishing
his control capability and he couldn’t put his finger on why. As a piece of his
mind started to reflexively run through possibilities ranging from mechanical
issues to sensory overload a full 1300 sparks went offline and just hovered in
position waiting for instructions.

Mentally kicking himself for that…and losing another
50 in the process…Tom cleared his mind of all other thoughts and put himself
into the battle trance with the sparks coming back online and consuming every
part of his waking mind. He was them and they were him, with his mind pressing
its limits to be able to see so many viewpoints and feather the mental trigger
on so many weapons and navigation options. Normally an Archon in a nexus had to
keep perspective over everything that was happening, but for this controlled experiment
it was just about the combat…targets and kills and nothing else. He needed to
know what he and the system was capable of before scaling back for more
reliable operations.

As he maneuvered the skirmishers around he triggered
more explosives, losing a handful of them but clearing the path for the mass of
others to move through in clusters. There was a band of hidden turrets and
traps stretched across the landscape that had been arranged by another Archon
so Tom didn’t know of their locations, but once a corridor was punched through
it there was a stretch of what appeared to be clear space leading up to the
swarms of infantry bots.

Suddenly that clear space grew a spread of targets as
more turrets popped up, having ignored the skirmishers and made themselves
visible only when the masses of sparks were above them. They fired into the
hordes with phasers and rockets, hitting many simply by firing without having
to aim and getting multiple units with some of the explosions. The armor on the
sparks was decent, but they were so small that they couldn’t pack much onto
them for lack of available space…and the rockets’ yields were considerably
high, enough to level a building and were only slightly smaller than a lizard
debt pack.

Tom reacted immediately, pulling the sparks away from
each of the turrets to create a clear zone that would allow the sparks to fire
on them without hitting each other. He raised up the sparks into rows on top of
one another, forming a wall around each turret as they pummeled them with plasma
streaks save for the few he left open for the walkers to target. The clear
Keema beams shot across the distance and tagged them slowly, for the recharge
on the weapon was considerable and only the first walker was in position to
fire.

He changed that up, having all of the
leonardos
fan out to get into firing position. Meanwhile a
lot of his sparks were dropping offline from the damage and Tom began pulling a
dozen or so out of the ‘waiting pool’ as needed…then the infantry bots
accelerated across the landscape, coming up over several ridges like a flow of
ants. They charged directly into the skirmishers, firing on them and taking
several down as Tom surged the sparks forward, knowing this was going to
stretch his mental limits. He stopped pulling up reinforcements as units went
offline to the turret damage and waited for the snapping point to come as he
started firing the weapons of more and more sparks.

He was targeting each one of them manually with a bit
of aim assist from their computer programming as well as guiding their
movements, all individually. That allowed him precise attacks as well as
unparalleled unit cohesion for all of the sparks were fighting as if they were
of a single mind…which in this case was literally true, for they were all an
extension of one trailblazer.

Tom’s mind began to fog up immediately, forcing him to
cut loose another few hundred. That brought the crystal clarity back and
allowed him to cut through the infantry bots with a variety of tactics similar
in nature to naval combat, save these happened at a much faster pace. Damaged
units were cycled off the front lines and into support positions while clusters
were used to separate and flank the enemy formations. They too tried to use
tactics again the sparks rather than just coming at them in a blind horde that
fired on the nearest targets, but they couldn’t coordinate as effectively as
the sparks could, leaving Tom’s forces with a decided strategic advantage.

But they didn’t have a weapons advantage…or at least
not much of one. They did have their armor and shields, but since the enemy was
patterned off the lizards there were far more infantry bots than there were
sparks, not to mention the tanks that were holding back behind a ridgeline.
When the leading edge of the sparks crossed it they moved in, using the terrain
to block the firing lines from the mechs.

When that happened Tom sent Victoria a signal to take
them in, with him bringing the escort drone mechs along with her. They would
need to take the tanks head on, or otherwise their greater armor would allow
them to eat up the sparks. In the future they’d try to develop anti-tank
variants but right now all these could handle was anti-infantry, with massed
attack as the only hope against heavier targets.

That was one of the primary challenges for Tom today,
to see what he could do against them. The sparks were little more than floating
micro turrets that could be taken out with a single tank blast, so it was going
to be in the maneuvering that he gained an advantage rather than through any
shield recharging strategies that the Archons used heavily in naval combat.
Virtually everything Star Force built had that longevity in mind, but Tom was
going to have to go a different way against the tanks his mechs couldn’t take
down.

He barely noticed as Victoria opened fire on the
closest one, seeing it through the ‘eyes’ of the sparks and not the mech’s
telemetry. He was viewing the other four but not the
morpheus
,
allowing him to handle more of the drones in lieu of keeping in the loop as to
what Victoria was doing. If his mental control were a hurricane, then the
morpheus
was the calm center of that storm that he was
completely blind to…which made his copilot even more invaluable in keeping him
alive.

Tom knew he was being crude with his control, but
right now he was using only three options for each spark. Target and fire,
position change, and altitude change. When he needed a lot of plasma beams on a
tank he’d raise up and stack the sparks into a wall, or form a brick of them
that would push into the infantry bots, flaking off dead sparks and driving
well into their formation in order to disrupt it. He’d send reinforcements up
that corridor so they could fire on the others from the sides, getting more
guns on target and managing the flow of bots that kept increasing with every
minute.

Had
these
been Regulars,
Knights, and Archons on the ground they would have necessarily turtled up and
worked to kill off those closest to them, weathering the storm through armor
and shields and rotational strategies in order to keep anyone from getting
killed, but since the sparks were just machines Tom could be more aggressive
and abandoned most of the shield recharging formations and just hammered the
opposing infantry. One on one the sparks would win easily, and it was important
for Tom to keep the bots from massing too densely, else their combined
firepower would eat through the sparks quite fast.

To do that he sent clusters shooting out into the
enemy formation like fingers, then spreading them out and sending units right
into the midst of the enemy formations expecting to lose them, but not before
they killed many bots and thinned the lines…at which point he’d surge the
others and wipe them out using traditional cycling strategies to preserve the
rest of his mechanical troops.

It worked well enough that he saw the infantry bots
start to pull back after about 12 minutes of fighting…then the tiny bit of his
brain that was still left to wonder realized it was because the walkers had
just gotten up over the ridge and into firing position. These
leonardos
were configured mostly as troop transports, but
the defensive weaponry on them was more than sufficient to do damage to armored
targets at range, not to mention some point defense weapons for if the bots
ever got close enough to start chipping away at their legs.

Suddenly there were more targets popping up, which Tom
only noticed due to their proximity to the walkers. He and the mechs were up
with the tanks now, leaving the walkers in the back with the extra sparks
tagging along in preprogrammed navigational mode. He wasn’t seeing through
them, only the walkers, when the hidden doors under the ice opened up and broke
through the cold camouflage and spilled out swarms of the infantry bots right into
the midst of the neutral sparks.

Not one of them fired back, for they couldn’t without
Tom’s control…forcing him to choose between fighting up front or disengaging
his mind from those so he could defend the walkers…who couldn’t very well shoot
down into the swarms of sparks without destroying them as well.

“Damn,” he whispered, losing control of over a
thousand for a second when he uttered the word and lost concentration. It took
him another second to decide to send the neutral sparks off to distant waypoints,
having them run away from the walkers rather than switching control over to
them or abandoning the front lines. They were faster than the infantry bots and
quickly cleared the area, letting the
leonardos
have
clear firing lines down near and around their feet.

A handful of Sammy turrets opened up on the bots,
killing several with showers of yellow energy spurts that were actually a very
high cyclical rate of the same beam firing tiny bits of bolts. Each turret
bathed an area where the infantry bots were, for Tom couldn’t precisely target
them without abandoning more sparks on the front lines, instead using area of
effect commands and having the onboard computers handle the distribution
patterns.

Instead of running or chasing the sparks the infantry
bots ran under the walkers and fired on them with their tiny phasers, doing no
damage to the armor with the walkers’ shields covering them. Those were
virtually impervious to the small weapons…up until some of the bots began
ramming the legs and detonating against them.

The shield strength dipped in chunks with each
explosion and the phaser bursts only added to it in the hundreds of strikes per
second. Tom forced himself not to calculate how much damage was being done and
how much time he’d have, else he’d lose control of more sparks. He made the
choice to let the walkers fend for themselves and ordered them to group up
closer and share their point defenses as he continued to press the assault
against the main infantry wave.

There was no victory end to this engagement. They were
meant to fight and that was it, with the results being measured afterwards to
determine weaknesses and efficiencies. His opposition was going to do as much
damage as they could and they’d just found a way to mess up his plans, so
rather than aid them by scrambling to make changes he continued on, letting
them chip away at one of the leonardo’s legs as he kept the most number of
sparks engaged as he could.

Meanwhile Victoria was hauling him around in the
morpheus
kicking the crap out of the tanks with her maulers
and stitching the infantry bots with her anti-air pods whenever she could get
an angle forward. A lot of anti-air defenses, whether they be man-sized or
planetary, did not lower to ground level to avoid being disabled from such
strikes. A big orbital battery tipping over to target things like Skarron
walkers could be a huge boost to a city’s defense, but likewise that battery
tip would bring the sensitive pieces of that weapon into the firing line of the
ground troops.

That was why they were normally covered in a shell of
armor or building that would keep them safe from all but air assets while they
exclusively targeted the same. Some units like the mechs had experimented with
shoulder-mounted pods that could tip over and double as anti-infantry mods, and
that’s exactly what this
morpheus
had been outfitted
with. The small
sammies
roasted the infantry bots
with single hits, allowing Victoria to keep the little
det
pack bots from getting up to her mech’s legs while their numerous phaser hits
kept chipping away at her mech’s shields.