Star Force: Evacuation (SF50) (3 page)

“Like hell they will,” she said, already having chosen
that group to fight with the moment she walked in and saw their position on the
holo map.
“Anything new from the Hycre?”

Yensic
adjusted the smaller
map alongside the main display, bringing up an orbital diagram.

“Kills made in the following locations,” he said as
the computer threw up a few new icons. “Most of their fleet is in the system
hunting down the other cruisers that didn’t go to ground.”

“Any help with the surface targets yet?”

“Actually, they’re the one that killed the cruiser in
the blind.”

“So they are engaging ground targets?” Riona asked for
clarity.

“A few targets that they choose, but they don’t have
many ships down here for some reason.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t.”

“You want me to ask?”

“Yes. Phone in the results,” she said, having seen
enough and heading back out and over to the hangar. Within minutes she was back
into the sky and heading towards the mechs now engaging the lizard tanks
underneath a swarm of wisps that were dying quickly but adding enough plasma
damage to be troublesome. One drone corvette was also there, adding its
weaponry to the battle, but there were literally thousands of wisps in play
overhead of hundreds of tanks with more coming out onto the sands by the
minute.

Numbers…always a numbers game with the lizards, and
they usually played it well, but in this case the Alliance should have the
advantage, so long as they didn’t waste it. The lizards were going to hit them
hard and try to bleed them of troops, not enough to stop their assaults but to
delay them long enough for help to arrive. That meant Riona and her assault
force had a lot of work to do and not so long to do it.

A month, maybe more before they saw fresh enemies
coming into play. By then she had to have the major strongholds eliminated or
this could turn very ugly. The ADZ was going to take this world no matter how
tough it was, because leaving it in play would create an advantage for the
enemy that would cost them more
later
, so it had to
go. Her job was to hit it fast and efficient in order to avoid that
eventuality.

The lizards weren’t going to oblige her, as was their
nature. They’d fight to the last individual and try to take as many of the
attackers with them as possible, meaning suicide attempts and as much other
mayhem as they could muster. She was probably going to lose troops to some of
it, and she hated that, but the more fights like this the Alliance made the
more wary they were of the lizards’ tricks, which was why Star Force was
hitting the big targets, hopefully sparing Axius and the Scionate mass
casualties.

She trusted her troops, but Axius was still fairly
green and the Scionate were like the Hycre…allies, but out of her control.
Riona had command of the entire surface campaign, but she didn’t have the
ability to micromanage them like she could with her own troops and even Axius,
via the battlemap and her authority as an Archon.

Which was why she thought of the Scionate as ‘help’
rather than her own, focusing on what she could control and doing her best to
outthink the enemy…a long ongoing challenge that Archons had been facing for
centuries, with plenty of successes and failures on both sides.

3

May 16, 2536

Gwet
System (Delta
Region)

Leonis

Riona’s skeet took a hit, and not a small one. Somehow
one of the two lizard cruisers engaging a Star Force corvette a kilometer over
the surface of yet another enemy base that they were in the process of invading
had hit her with a primary cannon blast and tore off the right side engine pod.
The Archon drifted through the fire zone on the other two, eventually righting
her ship enough to fly in a straight line but was pounced on by the remainder
of the wisps in the battle.

They hammered her hull until they knocked out the left
side pod, which left her skeet hanging nose to the ground on the last one and
losing altitude. She tried to fly on just the one out of the battle but didn’t
make it another 10 seconds before her tail was blown off by a missile launched
from the infantry on the surface. Their new favorite weapon left her central
hull fully clipped and tumbling to the ground where she crashed into one of the
outlying lizard buildings.

She didn’t feel the impact, for thankfully the IDF was
still functioning, but did get a jarring vibration through some of the
connective beams letting her hear just how hard the hit was. She activated her
Pefbar and got a look at what was around outside, realizing that her skeet had
landed upside down and the cockpit was pinned to the ground in the rubble.

“Wonderful,” she said, triggering the release and
hearing a small click as it failed to move. Riona twisted around in the cockpit
and got her feet above her, quite a trick given the small confines, then pushed
hard wedging her back against the pommel seat.

She got a couple of inches of separation, wedging her
left toes into the crack to hold it as she mentally turned on her striker
armor’s powered setting, giving her a strength boost that allowed her to widen
the crack further. As she got it a foot or so open she felt the gravity
difference in her foot so she held form a moment and telekinetically reached
out to turn off the artificial gravity…with her head feeling like it flipped
over so that she was now standing upright rather than laying on her back.

Riona walked her feet further into the gap then let
the skeet fall back down on her ankles as she slipped off the pommel and
crouched down a few inches below it, getting a handhold on the rim of the
fighter and lifting as hard as she could. It didn’t move easily, but she did
get it up off the ground about a meter before she pulled a tricky one handed
support that let her drop down underneath it and get a shoulder on the rim. She
almost missed, but got herself wedged in with her muscles straining despite the
power enhancement when her head started to swirl with instability.

“No, no, no, not now!” she said, concentrating and
scattering the effect. Given any other circumstance she would have welcomed the
ascension prompt, but right now she was in hot water and there was no time.
Fortunately it took her warning and disappeared, clearing her head and letting
her focus on lifting what was left of the skeet up again.

Riona repeated the jerk drop, this time forcing her
arms up as she lowered her torso and held an Atlas pose for a moment with her
butt nearly touching her heels. She took a twitchy step forward and came back
up, pushing her helmet against the hull and making very tiny steps along it
until she caught against a section of rock-like wall and could go no further,
so she twisted around and pushed laterally as the fighter slipped down,
creating a small crevice that she got herself stuck in just as a pair of
scalely heads began to climb up over the debris.

One of them got its rifle up and into firing position
before Riona yanked it from him telekinetically. She thought about trying to
shoot him with it as the other came up into firing position then abandoned the
idea, emitting a Fornax field as she wiggled and clawed her way up a few inches
with the fighter still pinning her against the wall.

It was an effort to move, let alone maintain the
field, and the instability in her head started to come back again. Now
thoroughly frustrated she dismissed it a second time and continued to work her
way up, glad that her striker armor’s design was smooth on the exterior and she
wasn’t wearing a pack or rack on her back, for eventually she was able to slide
free once she got her waist up past the choke point, letting her slender legs
pull through without incident.

Riona climbed on top and finally released the Fornax
field, sagging a bit with relief as she reached down and picked up one of the
lizards, throwing him off the heap of rubble that was inside one of their
structures and knocking down three more climbing up towards her. She mentally
flicked on her shields as plasma fire started to hit around her and pulled the
lizard rifle into her grip as she side kicked the other one off the top of the
skeet wreck.

Her plasma rifle was in the cockpit, but she wasn’t
going back down to try and pull it out at the moment, needing to deal with
these infantry first. The striker took two short steps over the burnt hull and
jumped, coming down into the group below and firing at them from pointblank
range, taking hits to her shields as she did so.

The exchange didn’t last long, with Riona mowing them
down with ease and them unable to get through her shields, though one did try
to grab her legs and knock her over. He got sent back the other way with a
stern kick before receiving the last plasma blast to his chest, melting through
most of his vest armor before she fired a second for good measure, punching
through the hole and killing him.

Riona tossed the weapon aside, noting how it wasn’t as
strong as she was used to as she concentrated and searched inside her ship with
her Pefbar, eventually finding her rifle and guiding it up through the crevice telekinetically
and over into her waiting hand.

“That’s better,” she said, turning the power on and
jumping over some of the low rubble before climbing over a broken wall and up
near to the roof. She didn’t have a jump pack on, or anything else for that
matter, so she tossed her rifle up first then jumped, getting a handhold on a
broke piece of ceiling and pulling herself up where she awkwardly pulled her
body over the ledge and into the clean air.

Riona retrieved her rifle and looked around, seeing
that she was still well within the lizard base but not too far from a pair of
mechs blasting their way into the interior…with the enemy counterattacking with
overwhelming numbers of infantry and a good number of tanks in support.

“When in Rome,” she muttered before running over to
the edge and sliding her legs over the side before dropping down to street
level some 13 meters below. She fell on impact, but partially rolled out of it
and came up into a run headed for the nearest lizard as they saw her and
responded accordingly.

Riona dove into the melee and got to work, remaining
with the ground offensive until she ran out of ammo a few minutes later, then
began working her way back to the exterior of the base and fighting hand to
hand where necessary until she got to a group of Star Force commandos and
bummed a replacement clip from one of them, then took up command of their small
group along with grabbing a Calavari Knight from nearby. With the four-armed
mass of white armor leading the way she assisted them psionically in punching
deeper into the infantry as one of the nearby cruisers fell out of the sky and
shook the ground so hard two of her men tripped and fell.

The battle from that point on was one-sided, with the
Star Force warship eventually killing the other cruiser and using what
operational weaponry it had for close-in fire support, but none the less the
combat was brutal up close with the lizards making them pay for every inch of
ground they took…and then once they had the surface secure they transitioned
into a subsurface theatre where the naval and aerial power couldn’t come into
play. The mechs did, to a certain extent, but some 36 hours later they were
still fighting it out hand to hand deep inside planet’s crust as an Axius team
came in to relieve the battle weary mainline troops.

Riona stayed and helped them clean up most of the hot
spots, then with fatigue dragging her into a near coma she eventually relented
and turned over command to an Axius Protovic, letting him see to the rest of
the sweeps and allowing her to return to the surface where she called for a
dropship to pick her up and take her back to the TF.

Riona dosed off enroute, having to be woken up by the
pilot when they’d returned. She thanked him then dragged herself out, turning
on the powered nature of her armor to help her walk back into the confines of
the huge dropship and find her temporary quarters where she began stripping off
her sweaty armor, feeling a huge sense of relief. She was about to grab a very
quick shower, if she could keep herself awake long enough, when she got two
steps away from the tube entrance and fell to the ground when the instability
in her head returned.

“Alright, might as well,” she said, urging it on and
feeling the stress immediately increase. This had happened once before, or
rather four tries ending up with
one new ability
, plus
the battlemeld transfer that Jason had helped her trigger. Her Yetu ability had
manifested just like this, and she was eager to see what new ability was making
its way forward, despite how tired and loopy she was.

Lying on the elevated shower platform sweaty and
naked, she suffered through the transition pains and succeeded in pushing it
all the way through to spurn the new tissue growth…which left her in so much
pain spread across her entire body that she wondered what the hell she had just
gotten, or whether or not her fatigue had contributed to the effect, perhaps leaving
her too weak for a ‘regular’ transition.

Sweaty and smelly as she was after spending a day and
a half in her armor, Riona mentally told herself to forget the shower and began
to climb to her feet to head to bed, not getting more than a knee step forward
before saying to hell with it and easing herself back down to the ground and
sinking into the fluffy bath mat and falling asleep within seconds.

Riona woke up 6 hours later, feeling like it had been
maybe 5 minutes, and was shocked to see how bad she’d been hit. Her entire body
ached and her neck had a pinch in it from the angle her head had been bent, but
she summoned up enough energy to finally take her shower, then she got dressed
and dropped into bed for another 4 hours before getting up and eating something…and
by something that was two plates full of food and a load of ambrosia cookies.

Knowing she was unfit for combat and curious as to
what new ability she’d gained she headed over to the TF’s training facilities
for some light workouts. The dropship didn’t have a sanctum onboard, for that
was located in the rest of the warship, but it did have an abnormally shaped
running track/hall plus several sparring chambers and challenge specific rooms.
Riona went for an easy 5 miles to start with, trying to work out the burning in
her muscles from the transition before grabbing a punching bag and doing some
light sparring with it…that she gradually escalated up into her normal caliber
blows.

Despite her body disagreeing with her she activated
her Yetu, which was a combination neural enhancement/muscle speed mode that she
could maintain for 12 seconds max…or at least that had been her best to date.
She didn’t try for anything so energetic, instead
pulsing
it for .5 to 1 seconds and getting some blurry punching combos in on the bag,
which registered hits and strength intensity on a holographic diagram floating
nearby, which the striker used to calibrate her workout and create a baseline
for analyzing just how bad her body was at the moment.

She’d been worse before, but only barely. Everything
in her seemed to be hurting, and the Yetu made that pain flare up something bad
but she stubbornly kept nibbling at it, trying to work herself into a semblance
of normal so she could get back out into the field. Flying
a
skeet
wasn’t that strenuous, but she needed quick hand movements to fly
effectively and right now she couldn’t hold her hand still. She was shaky and
needed to bleed it off, and triggering Yetu was a painful, yet effective way of
resetting herself through the super speed that her twitchiness seemed to be
imitating.

Rather than trying to hold herself still she’d feed the
movement, or so her theory went. It wasn’t working well but after a while she
started to get a bit of inner calm that she knew would transition over into
other things with time, so she pressed on. The workout continued well past an
hour, but she didn’t relent nor did she escalate, preferring to just ‘grease
the gears’ rather than exhaust herself again, with that sensation lingering on
the edge of her senses as it was.

Riona went through a series of kicking drills against
the target, some hitting with her foot and others with her shin…which
was
usually a bad idea for there was no muscle covering it,
just skin over bone for the most part and not a good place to get hit. The bag
was soft enough to alleviate that but firm enough to give necessary resistance,
so after several hundred kicks her shins were starting to complain a bit…which
was when it finally happened.

As if protecting her leg from the next impact, Riona
felt an invisible bubble directly over her bare skin hit the bag without her
flesh ever making contact. She kicked three times in sequence, with the same
light effect, until she finally stopped and tried to figure out what was going
on. The Archon touched her bare leg with her fingertips, wondering if her skin
was starting to get abrasion fried, but there was no sign of it so she went
back to the drills with the sensation returning some 30 seconds later.