Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (6 page)

Frustrated with the lizards sticking in the trees to
snipe from, the Bsidd next to Tvey ran forward, hacking a few more branches
before wrapping some of his free appendages around a pair of lizards and
throwing them back towards Tvey and the others.

A down thrust plasma rod hit one in the head, burning
through its skull while Tvey shot the other at pointblank range before jumping
over to one of the brush piles and circling around it, executing a backdoor on
some of the other lizards massing up just beyond and filing into firing lines
that would allow them to pepper the Bsidd with enough plasma hits to get
through their defenses.

Tvey stabbed three of them with his plasma rods but
didn’t bother shooting the others. Instead he pushed into the group with his
rifles and other appendages forming a wireframe snowplow, hooking the ends to
keep them contained, then rammed them forward into the kill zone depositing
some 8 or 9 of them into view of the others while his back took numerous plasma
strikes.

He didn’t stop his momentum, pushing through then
stepping on and over the group until he got behind the others and into a bit of
cover as they stepped forward and slaughtered the lizards. Tvey brought his
rifles up as he turned around and fired off a few shots between them, seeing
more and more enemy infantry moving through the trees towards them and the
others, so many that they seemed to be a living tidal wave coming forward to
wrap around their legs.

Superior as they were, Tvey began to fear for their
lives until he caught a glimpse of silver streaking through the forest nearby
and lizards dropping all around it.

They had Archons with them, and so long as they said
to fight Tvey and the others would, knowing that they wouldn’t be left here to
die. If a retreat was needed the Archons would order it, but up until that
happened it was slaughtering time.

With that thought banishing his fear, Tvey went left
and started another backdoor run around a brush pile, finding plenty of lizards
nearby to grab and shove into their kill zone.

6

Krissy ducked her skeet under a wisp to avoid three
others coming in so close she was sure they meant to ram her. The sky was
dotted with clusters of them, all of which were trying to either shoot the Star
Force fighters down or keep them distracted and away from the ground troops
that were in need of air support. Reports were they were holding their own, but
as typical the lizards were spamming them with insane numbers that her
scattergun was fated for.

Getting to them was difficult, but she was almost
through the wisp formations and dipping down to tree level to get under this
one. A few more threw down green plasma orbs around her, two of which hit her
right side engine but the shields covering it held and she accelerated hard to
try and lose her pursuit. Other skeets were scattered around, far too few to
take down all the wisps in time, so she and a number of them were tasked with
getting through while the others went for kills.

She wasn’t near any of the others and that isolation
drew a lot of attention to her, for as soon as she zipped away from the group
peppering her from above two more formations angled in on her and forced the
Star Force regular to bank up and away from the forest, allowing them to come
at her from all sides and not seeming to care about friendly fire.

Her shields were dipping lower and lower and it was
just a matter of time before these gnats stung her to death. She wasn’t going
to let that happen and would pull up and head for orbit if need be, for there
was no way the wisps could keep pace when she entered super pursuit mode,
though that required a clear line ahead and a bit of prep. Unfortunately Krissy
couldn’t use that speed here because it was straight line and she was having to
maneuver like crazy to even get close to the ground battle ahead.

The moment of choice was nearly on her, when she would
have to choose to head out of the mess of fighters or keep on pushing forward.
Problem was the armor on her skeet was thin in order to afford her the movement
capability that was more desperately needed. It would take some plasma hits and
keep her flying, but it wasn’t tank armor by any stretch of the imagination.
The fighter’s shields were its primary defense and they were slowly being
whittled away.

A signal from another nearby skeet also pushing its
way through the mess of wisps prompter her to turn hard left and head for the
source of the brief
comm
signal. The lizard fighters
around her changed course to follow and soon she saw the tiny dot that was the
other skeet highlighted on her HUD ahead, with her dipping down slightly for
what was going to be a
passby
. She readied her
scattergun and waited for the skeet to wink past, taking a few more hits as she
flew a straight line towards the rendezvous.

When the two fighters nearly rammed each other they
both opened fire on the other side, targeting the wisps directly following
their twin. The plasma scattergun fired off numerous little potent packets of
plasma in a cone rather than at a specific target, catching numerous wisps as
both pilots held in on the trigger and fanned the area ahead for a couple of
seconds before banking hard and coming back around towards the center point.

The unshielded wisps took hits, some going down to
crash in the forest below and others moving off with damage, unable to keep
pace with the maneuvering skeets that now linked up in paired mode and
aggressively attacked the wisps swirling around them. Whenever one of the enemy
fighters would align on a skeet the other would hit or scare it off, and
between the two of them they took down some 14 fighters before returning to
their primary objective with more wisps moving in to fill the void of those
they’d just shot down.

Krissy and the other pilot stayed together but with
enough space to allow each to maneuver in a wavy line as they dodged some of
the incoming fire. Plasma traveling through air diminished more rapidly than
through a vacuum, which meant shorter effective range and the lizard wisps
exclusively used plasma. The skeets had longer range weapons that they could
use to skillfully poach them, but right now that wasn’t the point…getting to
the ground troops was.

That meant punching through and trying not to get hit
as much as the wisps would like. Those that were further away were firing ahead
of the skeets, hoping they’d fly into the bands of plasma rain and it was those
that the Star Force pilots were weaving around, for it was almost impossible to
dodge a single plasma shot. While they didn’t fire at lightspeed, nor close to
it, they were not slow through the air and aside from a slight twitch of the
flight controls there wasn’t much you could do against a well-aimed shot.

The trick was in getting the wisps to make bad shots,
but to get to the mission point as quickly as possible you needed to fly a
direct line…which was predictable as hell. That was the conundrum Krissy faced,
but now with two skeets together the enemy had twice the number of targets to
shoot at and that actually diminished the number of hits her fighter was
taking.

That convinced Krissy to risk it and she continued
forward, with the other pilot eventually
comming
with
a strategy and telling her to go low to the riverbed. She agreed and the other
skeet flew directly
overtop
of hers, with their
silhouettes matching up from top view, then Krissy dove down as the other skeet
went aggressive and tried to draw as much attention to him as possible.

She took her skeet back down to the forest and
angle/braked hard to turn her momentum into the twisty line of the river,
flying so low that there were trees to either side of her as she skimmed the
dry wash. There were no lizards here, but a couple of kilometers ahead there
were, crossing into the open
en
mass and just begging
to get hit.

The wisp pilots knew that too and some came after her
with a vengeance, but she ignored them and stuck to the river bed pulling some
Mario Kart worthy skid turns to keep from careening into the tree walls as
numerous plasma blasts rained down around her and kicked up dust plumes from where
they hit dirt and rocks.

Krissy’s course kept whipping back and forth, then
suddenly there was a sea of green heads and she hit the brakes, using her
gravity drives to slow her forward momentum down to a slow flyby as she tilted
the scattergun firing angle down and unleashed her blue rain onto the riverbed.

Burnt flesh flew everywhere like confetti and dozens
of lizards fell per heartbeat as she made her way up the river with the
overhead plasma blasts still coming down and hitting the lizard troops with the
misses. Apparently they felt it was worth the tradeoff if they could kill her,
and they were probably right mathematically speaking, but shooting your own
troops to kill a target was colder than cold and just one more reason why these
dishonorable bastards had to die.

Krissy pushed through the river for more than half a
mile before the stream of lizard infantry ended. When it did she pulled up,
intent on making a loop and dogfighting for a handful of seconds before heading
back down for another pass for the disruption she’d made in the troop flow was
already disappearing as more came out of the forest to cross, erasing the gaps
she’d made in their fleshy flood of slowly moving bodies.

When she got back to decent altitude she had to linger
longer than she’d liked, for her shields were near to breaching. Going evasive
she avoided fire long enough for them to start
ticking
up a bit with recharge, then she engaged and killed three more wisps before
heading back down for another pass just in time to see the other pilot strafing
a section of forest nearby. Krissy didn’t know what that was about and was
going to shoot the targets out in the open, but there were three more skeets
headed their way and they were dragging a lot of wisps with them…meaning her
time here was going to be short, for she couldn’t sustain much more plasma
fire, no matter how bad of shots the lizard pilots were at speed.

Knowing that, Krissy ignored the incoming fire and
dove back down to make one more pass, intending to bug out as soon as she’d
completed it. Her topside shields got hammered as she flew through a few meters
over the riverbed, but the carnage her scattergun was unleashing more than made
up for it. When the other side of the flood came into view she was just about
to make for the sky when a request for fire support came in from an Archon on
the ground.

Krissy shot off across the empty riverbed and weaved
between the tree walls, seeing if the lizards would still follow her…which they
did, but two or three wisps peeled off as she got further away from the ground
troops. Biting her lip, she decided to do something stupid and pulled up just
enough to get over the treetops and turned back, heading for the location for
the air support request that was a few kilometers away. She’d be damned if she
left an Archon hanging, and was going to risk some hull damage to give him some
help…then she’d bug out.

With a plasma hit to her tail that flashed a 7%
warning for that section of shield Krissy got mad and flicked her skeet up
through as tight of a backwards loop as she could, with the wisp following her
through it given the craft’s nimble nature. What it couldn’t cover was the
hover twist she put her skeet through, spinning it around and flying backwards
long enough to fire two small mauler blasts, one of which hit the wisp and blew
apart half its hull.

That enemy fighter dropped to the forest as Krissy
accelerated forward and nulled out her backwards momentum, redirecting in a way
that caused the other wisps to loop around to pursue her…and that gave her a
moment’s reprieve from their hounding fire.

A slight turn to the right brought her into line with
the waypoint marker indicating where the Archon wanted the incoming air
support. She asked for a confirmation with a simple button press rather than
the tedious nature of
comming
that particular Archon.
In the seconds that had elapsed something on the ground might have changed, but
she got the confirmation almost immediately and set herself, for it was a
single point in the forest and a flyby wasn’t going to be good enough. If the
Archon wanted it pounded, then she was going to level it.

Krissy flew across the treetops, now seeing flashes of
light from down inside the forest but unable to make out who was who for more
than a fleeting moment here and there. Trusting in the waypoint she hit the
brakes hard and flipped up on her nose as she gained a little bit of altitude,
pointing the long tail of the T-shaped craft towards the sky as she came into a
hover over the location and fired every weapon that she had down into the
forest.

Both mauler cannons obliterated the trees below when
they hit, throwing out wooden shrapnel like bombs as her scattergun shredded
the leaves and branches. Her long range
sammie
she
fired off as well, hoping for a little more damage. Each weapon had its own
cycle time, so she just held in the triggers for all of them and cringed
against the plasma damage she was taking from the wisps, for as long as she
held still those dumbass pilots didn’t have any trouble hitting her.

Her shield indicator flashed red, then several spots
on her hull armor lit up with damage warnings. Biting her lip again she waved
her firing line back and forth a bit, then stopped firing and punched the
acceleration of her gravity drive as fast as she dared, shooting her fighter
straight up tail-first. As she gained altitude she spun it around her center
axis so she faced forward, just in time to see a flash of hull as she clipped
one of the wisps.

A huge gash formed in the schematic representing her
fighter that ran nearly half the length of her port side, having punched
through the armor and hit numerous internal systems…but all three engines were
still there and had partial power, though her
sammy
and scattergun were completely dead.

That didn’t matter now, for she was just clawing for
distance skyward as several wisps followed her up and more at altitude angled
down towards her. Getting her skeet reset from the deviation that the collision
had caused, Krissy continued to accelerate, but without her shields super
pursuit mode wasn’t possible anyway, let alone with the power drain for at
least one of her six redundant generators had to have been disabled in the
collision.

All showed operational on her display, which meant
that a connecting line must have been severed. Either way that generator or two
was out of order and she didn’t have time to do a diagnostic to see what was
out. All she had time to do was climb and glance at the displays before angling
30 degrees to the east and continuing to accelerate slowly, trying to put some
distance between her and the thickest regions of wisps.

Some continued to follow her, at a distance, but they
weren’t behind, rather ahead and lateral giving them opportunities for
intercept unless she could get clear and up to speed…which didn’t look likely.
The more momentum she built the faster she would go, but without her shields
cutting the wind her aerodynamics were limited. That combined with the power
drain was going to make this dicey.

She wasn’t going to call for help though, because that
meant a skeet or two would have to leave the ground troops hanging and she
wasn’t going to have that. If necessary she could crash land and get picked up
later, knowing that her pilot’s cocoon would make it very hard for the lizards to
kill her even if they finished off her skeet.

Still mentally cursing herself for running into one of
them, she test fired the maulers to make sure they were actually still
functional. Both fired off normally and their recharge rate was diminished but
present, so she could fight a bit if she had to…and it looked like that was
going to be necessary.