Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) (7 page)

“Morgan, get out of there now!” a voice yelled in her
helmet.

“
Wha
…” she said, caught off
guard and getting whacked in the face with a Hobbit plasma orb. She pulled
herself back into the moment and threw off a few more Jumat blasts while
telekinetically picking up her rifle and bringing it into her left hand while
continuing to use her right to knock enemies aside and cause continuous
confusion.

“Just get out, the LZ is compromised. We can’t wait
for you.”

“What…” she said, getting knocked down as a Hobbit
tackled her from behind. She twisted on the ground and kicked him off before
throwing up a wave of concussive energy that cleared the perimeter around her
fallen body long enough for her to get up and start running towards the edge of
the mass of troops back towards the buildings that she’d jumped in from.
“…is going on?!”

“The Scionate are pulling out…all of them. Every unit
and ship across the planet is leaving.”

“What the hell?” Morgan said, shooting some more as
she got her mind into fleeing mode as she watched her shield strength closely.
Fleeing was going to get her more hits, but it couldn’t be helped. Without the
LZ pushing forward with troops there was no way she was going to be able to
take on the whole Skarron army by herself.

“They’re silent on the comms too, so I don’t know what
they’re doing,” the naval specialist ranger in charge of the orbital fleet and
overall mission organization said in dismay. “But they’re leaving us hanging in
a very bad way, and not just where you’re at. I’m scrambling to make
adjustments, but just get
yourself
out of there now!”

“Going,” she said, forcing herself to stop running in
a straight line as the shields covering her back began to get close to
breaching…and if the shots got through to her jump pack she was going to be in
real trouble.

Morgan turned to the left and circled around, throwing
off more Jumat and going aggressive again, tearing up and confusing the enemy
enough to cover another quick sprint closer to the edge but not on a straight
line. She stopped again and repeated, making small frog hops through the mass
until she got to the edge and headed towards one of the building doors,
stopping just in front of it and doing a Jedi jump up to the roof as she was
covered with plasma hits.

When her feet hit the rooftop edge she threw herself
into a roll, getting out of the line of sight of those troops as her shields
finally did breach. She rolled over her rifle and haphazardly got to her feet
as the turtle shell of a jump pack rocked her sideways as she rotated around on
top of it.

“Shit,” she said, getting a notice on her battlemap
that a pair of fighters were breaking off from the main engagement and heading
her way. She knew she had to get back down to street level or get roasted by
them, so she ran across one building and jumped to the next, chancing one more
before dropping off the edge and down out of sight…and landing on the back of a
Skarron elite below.

Morgan didn’t even try to kill
it,
she just sent an Ikrid pulse into its mind that rendered it into a zombie. She
didn’t have time to concentrate enough to put it to sleep, so she just stunned
it enough to jump off its back and Jumat blast her way through the Hobbits
escorting it as they opened up on her weak shields with their plasma.

Knocking them askew she ran off to the nearest corner,
getting around it and out of firing range as she kicked in her powered setting
and ran as fast as she could as more tiny soldiers and their ugly elephant-sized
overlords kept popping up into view wherever she fled.

7

“Damn it,” Kev-10001 said, resisting the urge to punch
the control sphere he was holding onto as he oversaw the planetary operations
from orbit. He had 6
Warship-
class
jumpships contending with the Skarron fleet and guarding the cargo ships that
had brought the troops in. He would have dismissed them to an obscure part of
the system for safe keeping except that he couldn’t spare a single ship to go
with them as escort plus some of them still had troops onboard.

There were also Axius and Canderous warships in system
but the bulk of their naval force, some 62%, were Scionate…all of which were
pulling out of the fight to screen for their own transports that were picking
up their ground troops and leaving the system. The Skarrons had obviously seen
this and were pressing their attack, and the ranger didn’t have enough ships
left to hold them back for long. As it was he was sacrificing some of his
drones just to buy time to recall their own ground troops from the most
dangerous planetary zones, with those in somewhat secure ones packing up to
leave as well.

They couldn’t continue the assault without the
Scionate for they just didn’t have the numbers, and anyone left down on the
planet was going to be in a world of hurt…meaning he had to get them out before
they were overrun in orbit and the logistics weren’t in their favor. He knew he
couldn’t get them all out and it was the Scionate’s damn fault. If they’d just
given him a 10 minute heads up that would have been something, but they hadn’t
offered a peep of warning or explanation over the comms. They just up and
started to leave, without him or anyone else realizing what was going on until
several of their positions on the ground started to collapse as the Skarrons
poured through the positions the Scionate had been holding.

The Scionate in Axius weren’t going with them, they
were sticking with their units and they knew nothing about what was going on,
but as glad as he was for them not abandoning ship it didn’t matter much at
this point. Star Force was in full retreat now and losing men in the effort,
which Kev was trying to minimize.

Worse yet Morgan was still down there, but she’d
ordered him not to waste a dropship on her. He knew he just couldn’t leave her
down there, but when it came to picking up 50 some commandos or her, he gave
the trailblazer better odds at surviving another hour. But it wasn’t just her.
Pretty soon he was going to lose control of orbit and there would be no more
dropships heading down to the surface…and they had tens of thousands of troops
down there.

Focusing on the task at hand he kept sending out Ikrid
orders through the control sphere, taking personal control of the naval battle
while tweaking ground movements…anything he could to make a difference, and
there was no time to plan. They were already in over their heads and every
second counted, so he didn’t waste time venting and worked the problem even as
the dread in his gut began to grow as he noticed the casualty reports coming in
on a side screen.

Morgan dropped from the rooftop, falling through a few
meters of clean air before landing in the vegetation at the outpost’s edge. She
hit hard, her jump pack now gone and discarded as it had been shot and damaged.
Her feet twisted as they hit the straw-like stalks and she came down on her
shoulder, jarring herself as she bounced around a bit inside her armor, but
between the thin gel layer and the squishy ground she didn’t injure herself.

Rolling onto her feet she got up into a run as the
nearest exterior entrance opened up and Hobbits flooded out into the forest
chasing after her. She got four steps into her run before a geyser of dirt and
steam blew up in front of her as a plasma blast from a strafing fighter burst
through the canopy and hit two meters away.

The trailblazer jerked and juked but kept running,
knowing her speed was her best defense as she put distance between herself and
the outpost, but heading in a zigzag around the perimeter rather than running a
straight line away that the enemy could anticipate and follow with or without
seeing her. She didn’t know how well the sensors on the fighters would
penetrate the foliage, but if she could lose them then she was going to do her
best to do so…and if not she was going to make herself as hard a target to hit
as possible.

She knew she could outrun their infantry, so long as
they didn’t have any outside the perimeter already to collapse back down on
her. It was the fighters that were the problem, and given the little
demonstration she’d just made of her combat prowess the Skarrons knew she was a
high value target and they weren’t just going to let her slip away.

Morgan pressed hard, covering 4 kilometers in just
under
10 minutes but unable to lose their fighters that were
stitching the forest around her with plasma. However they were tracking her it
wasn’t precise, for they were missing most of the time but every now and then
she’d get a wash of plasma that would take her shields down and melt a touch of
armor. Fortunately the material had corovon flakes in it that resisted the high
heat well, leaving her with the ability to take several direct hits, but while
her shields would regenerate her armor would not, leaving every nick the
Skarrons made a permanent victory for them.

Eventually she came to a break in the canopy and had
to turn to her right, running along the side of a lazy river to avoid direct
visual contact with the fighters. Wondering where she was going to go next as
another plume of fiery foliage burst out in a spherical ‘pop’ to her right, she
made a rash decision and veered left, jumping into the river and submerging
herself as far as she could, down about two meters and digging her hands into
the silt on the bottom to pull herself down the rest of the way.

The filter on her helmet locked up, keeping the water
out and engaging her backup oxygen supply. It wouldn’t last long, but she
should have a few minutes without holding her breath and the water would block
the plasma. Question was
,
could they track her under
water?

Not staying in place so their infantry could get to
her last known position, Morgan pulled herself upstream against the light
current, clawing her way across the riverbed and glad that it was muddy water.
She could see where she was going thanks to the battlemap sensors that gave her
a crude proximity map, but she one upped that and clicked on her Pefbar,
getting a much more detailed visual. Once she got about 20 meters upstream a
cascade of plasma came down where she had been, churning up the river and
tracking up and down it…both ways.

One of the fat fighters came to a hover over the
river, close enough for Morgan to make Ikrid contact though she resisted the
urge to bring it down. She hacked into the pilot’s mind and observed what it
was seeing, and with a bit of translation work got the feeling that they were tracking
her shields.

That was odd, because to date they’d never shown an
ability to do that. When she’d hit the water she’d turned them off so they
didn’t waste power against the physical pressure. Pulling herself further
upstream she got some more distance as the fighter began moving along the
narrow riverbank, with the foliage on either side only a meter or two away from
the craft as it moved downstream searching while others zipped by overhead.

Keeping her shields in standby
 
mode Morgan continued to move underwater, but
finding it taking too long she risked a bit of disruption ripple and formed two
pillars of concussive energy outside of her legs, pooling the energy on the
outside of her armor before releasing it slowly down towards her feet. The light
pressure pushed against the water and moved her forward, with the trailblazer
reaching her hands out in front of her and forming a guide fine to adjust her
depth and direction as she moved further up river.

She kept going up until her oxygen ran out, then trolled
over to the riverbank and poked her head up inside some of the overhanging blue
leaves. The filters unlocked and began to pull small amounts of oxygen from the
air to recharge her backup as she breathed normally, sitting and waiting as she
extended her Ikrid out to its limits in search of nearby minds.

She immediately noticed a creepy little six-legged
lizard a couple meters above her head, but other than him and several others
along the river bank and some smaller stuff up in the trees she was alone, now
that the fighter had gone back up to altitude. Keeping her shields turned off,
Morgan slowly crawled her way up out of the water and through the foliage on
the edge, then disappeared off into the forest intent on putting some distance
on her last known position as far as the Skarrons were concerned.

Ella-2109BB-17 twitched, sending a spike a pain
through her abdomen that cut through the sleepy haze swallowing her head. She
fought it further, bringing herself back to consciousness enough for her to
open her eyes…seeing the inside of her battle helmet and half a visor full of
mud as she lay on the swampy ground with something obscuring her vision a meter
away. She tried to roll her head over but the pain exploded again as she tried
to move, with her briefly remembering getting hit with plasma before she’d
blacked out.

Gritting her teeth the Canderian forced herself up a
few inches, raising her helmet out of the ground where it had been half buried.
She didn’t have a chance to swipe the mud off for as soon as she got some
elevation she realized the thing blocking her vision was a body…along with
several others around her. She was
laying
on the
battlefield they’d just fought on along with the dead.

With that thought bringing her fully awake she checked
the battlemap, seeing that nobody was around save for a swath of red
dots…indicating the position of other suits of armor with suspected deceased
individuals inside. The dots had to be manually added after the fact, so that
transmitters that wouldn’t be turned off wouldn’t cause nearby active troops to
think reinforcements were nearby.

Ella saw that her own dot was tagged as red as well.
She bit back a scream of pain as she twisted when her arm slipped on the mud
beneath her, falling face first back down to the ground and remaining there as
she adjusted the battlemap to take the red off her dot.

She didn’t know how bad her injury was, but it wasn’t
going to let her do more than maybe walk. She couldn’t fight, and didn’t know
how much blood she’d lost, but she obviously couldn’t stay here. The Canderian
resolved herself to finding a way to move, but first she needed to figure out
where exactly she was and what the situation was.

Readying herself for another flare of pain, she
clenched up her muscles and pushed herself up to her knees with her head still
on the ground.

The tears in her eyes attested to the lack of
disappointment in her body’s response, but she somehow managed another
transition, rolling backwards so she sat on her heels and got her torso upright
so she could look around, but her first glance was down at her gut…which was
missing a huge chunk of armor. Beneath it was missing skin and muscle, with
charred flesh mauled up in a mess so bad that she made herself stop looking.

Knowing that she wasn’t going anywhere on her own, she
searched on her battlemap for any nearby units, extending the range out as far
as she could. There were still several contacts in orbit transmitting their
locations, but nothing on the ground aside from more red dots. There was nothing
for her to flee to, so she did the only thing she could, knowing she wasn’t
going to survive very long with this wound. She
unsafed
her primary transmitter and activated the emergency beacon setting,
transmitting in the open and with a signal strong enough to reach orbit.

It wasn’t stealthed like the battlemap signals were,
so the Skarrons could pick it up too if they were looking. Hopefully that
wasn’t the case, but there was nothing else she could do. Looking around she
saw dead everywhere, both Canderians and Hobbits, along with a good number of
Skarrons too but the distribution was all wrong. Normally the Canderians would
make the enemy pay for a defeat like this with 10/1 kills, but they’d been
blindsided by not one, but two infantry surges that caught them in the flanks
as they’d been executing a hasty, but controlled retreat.

Ella had been hit early, but even she knew the numbers
they were facing were all wrong. Someone had screwed up badly for that many
enemy troops to be that close nearby. And with so many Canderians dead around
her they had to have either been hit by heavy weapons or so many infantry that
there literally was no way to shoot them all.

But that didn’t matter right now, survival did.
Looking around for somewhere to drag herself, all she saw was bodies and scorch
marks on the plain they’d been running across. The forest edge was too far away
to get to and the narrow ravine in the center didn’t have enough terrain to
hide in, so she picked the biggest thing around, that being a Skarron body, and
started dragging herself towards it.

She crawled half a meter before having to stop, biting
back the pain, then resigned herself to moving only a few inches at a time so
her abdomen didn’t have to flex too much.

Bit by bit she moved herself over some 35 meters,
finding a plasma rifle on the way and dragging it with her up to the side of
the dead thing that was missing one of its arms. It lay a couple meters to her
right, with the plasma gun still attached to its ‘wrist.’

She poked it with the rifle several times, wanting to
make sure it was dead, then moved
herself
up alongside
the elephant-sized corpse and lay down on her side, curling up in a ball and
trying to hold as still as possible without putting tension on her abdominal
muscles that weren’t fully there anymore.