Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 8
“First impressions,” Jinni warned.
“True. I agreed to meet him for lunch later,” Paul said sarcastically.
“How much later?” Saul asked.
“After we complete our mission and I get back to the Halo,” he said, still not quite able to say that without a hint of a smile. Yes, there was an actual Halo built in the universe and not a replica by Star Force…it was just missing the whole civilization-ending weaponry in it. But on the upside, it also doubled as a stargate, which made it special in a whole other way. “He needs some pointers on the lightside.”
“I can’t think of anyone better,” Jinni said with a smile. “Would you like a hug, or can we get going?”
Paul smirked. “Get us heading for the closest Deenat. We’re using the Temple network as much as possible to save time. We pick up the ones in this galaxy, then get to hop through 3 others, making as many trips as we have to.”
“I thought you said they’d all fit in this transport?”
“I’m hoping they will. I can’t see how big they’ve grown, only their locations. We might have to make multiple runs if they’re larger than the one we already have.”
“Oh joy,” Jinni said, exchanging a glance with another Archon. “More long space trips.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be your trainer for the duration,” Paul said with a wink that promised a lot of grueling challenges, workouts, and sparring matches she and the others couldn’t hope to win. “Saul, get us moving. I’m done here.”
The Wrangler mentally contacted the bridge, and soon the stars outside the open hangar bay swirled around as the ship reoriented itself on a course heading for the jumppoint that would give them a straight line to the system center. The bay doors began to close as they started to move and Paul glanced at the others Wranglers.
“Ok, Jinni, who are all the new guys?”
7
EG29
August 4, 158438
MILKY WAY GALAXY
Lorichar Kingdom
Pagalia Neuronis System
Yuilia
Cora-005 hot dropped in her mech, a rare biped Hunchback that she’d brought out of mothballs on one of her Clan Scorpion worlds. Normally she piloted a Neo, but Star Force had seen enough ground combat with the Asferja to understand how they fought, and their bigger units were not very agile. Not enough for her to need a Neo to dance around in. What she needed was enough dexterity to suit her, along with a larger weapons package.
The Hunchback gave her that, with its two beefy shoulder ‘pads’ containing additional pulse cannons to the weaponry packed into the arms and torso. Even the legs had some weaponry built into them, mainly to deal with smaller opponents that would try to melee the mech to death, and the Asferja had those as well. They were a swarm race, and thankfully not that terrifying when it came to single combat…though hardly any swarm race ever was, and the Asferja she was fighting now were most likely grown and hatched from their fleshy plant-like pods within the past month, so they were nowhere near seasoned warriors.
They were operating off of genetic memory, just like the Paladin did, and their primary strength…in addition to the highly advanced bodies they were in…was their numbers. Numbers that they were using to overwhelm the native Yu’kor, population 2.6 billion. They were not defenseless, but they were not a match for the Asferja and not a part of Star Force. They’d only had diplomatic relations with them for the past 1,294 years, and not even an embassy at that. The Yu’kor had limited space travel within their system, but had never gone beyond it, instead taking on a defensive posture as other races found them.
That defensive posture was what had allowed them to hold off the Asferja invasion forces as long as they had, giving Cora time to get here with her elite Clan troops to save at least some of them. Had they put up the token resistance other races in the invasion zone had, they’d have all been dead by now.
The small fleet of Protovic warships that had discovered this incursion point had done what they could to bombard the planet, but the Asferja had gotten one of their hive colonies up and running, which included defense shields. They grew the damn stuff faster than a Star Force factory could produce it. Even their warships were mostly constructed of grown metals and other fabricated materials. That was how they processed ore, lipids, and even solar energy…using biological processes. Those base materials were then constructed using more normal means, but they had an entire tech tree, it appeared, based on growing prefabricated designs without ever having to actually construct them.
The hive base was one such design. They had armies of Asferja workers scouring the planet to claim or dig up resources, which they brought back and fed into what looked like trash pits that would digest, sort, and recombine the valuable molecules gathered into what they needed.
And these damn hives could grow to shield-producing maturity within 3 weeks if properly supplied.
So the Protovic hadn’t been able to remove them from the planet, only disrupt some of their groups when they went outside the hive perimeter. That further slowed the expansion down, but when the Asferja had seed ships going everywhere they possibly could and planting themselves immediately, it was hard to keep track of all the non-Star Force worlds out here, and some were slipping through the cracks.
Cora’s Hunchback hit the planet’s surface, easing down on an anti-grav jumpjet cushion along one of the current war zones as the Asferja troops were engaging the quadruped Yu’kor. Neither troops had personal shield generators, but the Asferja had a biological carapace that was armor grade, and they had units of at least 6 different sizes. Star Force kept encountering more and more on different planets, and it appeared the Asferja were as diverse as the lizards had been when it came to their forms.
But that also meant Cora wasn’t intimidated by the swarms, and she began running her mech out towards the nearest of them as the other four mechs in her command ‘star’ dropped down and followed her a few strides behind.
The 10-15 meter tall mechs pounded the ground as they ran with what seemed like unnatural speed, and Cora wasn’t even waiting until they got close to the enemy to open fire. She used the Bra’hem in her Hunchback’s left arm to shoot kilometers ahead whenever she got the chance…and hit almost every time despite the continual bobbing of the mech as it ran. She saw other stars in her ‘galaxy’ of mechs dropping at predetermined places all along the front simultaneously, and now that they were on the ground the natives were going to have a chance to survive, but removing the Asferja was going to be nasty work.
But it was ground work, in what otherwise had started out as a purely naval war, and mech fighting was what Cora and her Clan specialized in. Paul may have been right about naval beating everything, but naval couldn’t handle every combat scenario, and right now this one was Cora’s preferred avenue of fighting as she continued to snipe ahead at some of the medium to large Asferja, with most of her shots blowing holes in them with the rest of the potent beam coming out the far side.
Asferja carapace armor might work against infantry weapons, but without shields or real armor plating, it wasn’t going to stand up against mech weaponry. Especially not Star Force mechs.
She kept poking at the distant enemy from the flank as they were moving in on the Yu’kor packs…which were wearing body armor that oddly reminded her of Dino-riders…and it took a while for the Asferja to notice her star coming in despite the deaths they were racking up. But there were so many Asferja, a living carpet moving across the mostly flat landscape, that most wouldn’t even notice when one died for they couldn’t see them through the others.
The Asferja moved like a combination of ants and lemmings, using their sheer numbers to batter down their opponents as well as their formidable weaponry and augmented claws. Cora began waving her blue cutting beam sideways as she shot, scraping multiple Asferja off the horizon as she continued to close until their air assets finally moved to intercept her. The flying Asferja here were just bugs with wings…apparently it required more infrastructure to produce their actual aircraft…and they were just spamming as many basic units as they could to try and take control of the planet right now.
It was slowly working against the Yu’kor, but those low-level opponents were easy for Cora to take down, and her Hunchback was going to decimate them when it got in close.
She’d warned the Asferja as they came into orbit to stand down, surrender, or at least leave. They’d ignored her, as expected, and she’d recorded instructions for what they should do if they changed their minds. Her mech, and all the others were repeatedly sending that message out and would continue to do so throughout combat…but that’s the only consideration she was going to give these barbarians as they continued to hunt down, kill, and sometimes eat the native Yu’kor.
As for their flying units, the top of her Hunchback’s ‘pads’ that nearly rose up above its head were anti-air pulse cannons containing Dre’mo’dons small enough that they were able to spray up in groups rather than single shots, but still strong enough to do damage to aircraft. Cora dialed back the intensity even more, allowing for a larger number of bursts per recharge time, and the Asferja literally killed themselves by passing over top of her into that fountain-like spray with no mind to the units ahead of them that were dying. They just stayed on mission and got in close to drop acid pellets on the mechs whose shields didn’t allow the goop to even touch their armor.
It dripped down to the ground around them as the pieces of the Asferja’s bodies fell as well, angering Cora even more. These were brand new births, people who hadn’t even lived a year yet, and the Asferja genetic memory had them doing pointless attacks on instinct, for she didn’t sense any coordinated battle movements from them. Nothing even remotely like their naval fleets had demonstrated upon arrival. These were just a bunch of dumb bugs that she otherwise would have stunned into submission and hauled off to holding camps where they could have been contained and eventually rescued from their own genetic programming.
Star Force had done the same many times in the past, but the Asferja were too damn strong of a race to do that with here and now. Give them even a little breathing room and they’d spam into a position of dominance. Everyone who had fought the lizards recognized the threat, so all Cora had time to do now was dive in and start killing them. If she didn’t, a lot more Yu’kor would end up dead, and she wasn’t going to trade the people she was trying to save to try and help their enemy.
If she could do both she would, but she had to prioritize the Yu’kor. They didn’t have an option to leave, the Asferja were the ones forcing this fight.
As her mech continued to eviscerate the air units trying to fly over her, Cora kept running and eventually got within a mile of the ground swarms before part of them split away from the travel group and started charging her 5-mech star. She remained in the middle and ahead of the others, with them taking longer range shots alongside, but Cora was already using her pulse cannons at a range they normally wouldn't hit at, catching some of the Asferja with the diminished weaponsfire that was still enough to kill them.
But when the swarm closed on her and she ran into the middle of them, her mech was like a lumberjack cutting down trees. Scores of dead bodies flowed past her, their running momentum carrying them on as she opened up with her short range weaponry…something that a Hunchback was known for and was not very effective against most opponents, but against a swarm that liked to go melee it was perfect.
Perfect for her, not for the Asferja, and she was cutting them down twice as fast as any of the three Neos and one Nova Cat that were accompanying her. Cora kept pressing forward until they had fought through the river of Asferja and hit the clearing on the far side, then spun around and held their ground as the incoming Asferja went after the 5 mechs rather than passing on by to follow their brethren towards the retreating Yu’kor.
Cora watched her shields slowly get drained as her killcount rose fast, but she didn’t move from her spot against the never ending stream of fresh bodies, other than to step forward into it to clear the piles of the dead that were starting to get in the way of her targeting.
The Asferja weren’t useless, though, and eventually her shields did pop…but that’s why mechs had armor plating, and she held position, watching the status of each plate in mind’s eye as she continued to fight, her weapon systems running hot from nearly constant use, but they wouldn’t break down or overheat. They’d been designed and redesigned over the thousands of years her Clan had been in existence, and she knew exactly how much punishment they and this mech could take.
The Nova Cat, however, had to back off first, running off to the side and getting some of the Asferja to follow, but one of the Neos interceded and gave his fellow mechwarrior an out as it spun around, death sabers blazing and it melee chopped up the Asferja as much as it was firing at them.
Cora and the Neos held point even as some breaches started to form in non-critical spots…but only because she could see on the battlemap ahead that the flow was reducing to a trickle. Another 20-30 seconds and they’d be done with them.
The trailblazer kept firing her leg weaponry like shotgun blasts at the smallest Asferja carving into her leg plates with their corrosive claws…which wasn’t natural, but an implant they attached to the top of their hands. It was a living creature bioengineered to create a destructive acid-like poison on demand, which would flow harmlessly down their claws like paint, and as they ‘painted’ her mech with slashes, the little creatures would produce more to replace the ‘dry brushes.’
They reminded her of the symbionts from an old TV show called Earth Final Conflict, but she couldn’t remember what they were called. If and when they were able to make safe the Yu’kor, she would have to send some collection teams around and try to save what was left of the living weaponry, for otherwise they’d starve to death still attached to the Asferja corpses.
The Neofan had used creatures like this too, but when House Atriark had negotiated to settle in this galaxy, Star Force had banned that straight off, and their living Pol’so’nep had been given over to the Empire for safekeeping and care. The people who made living weapons out of people were despicable, especially for a race as genetically advanced as the Asferja. They should have been able to create biological augments that functioned the same way without having a person in it. The fact that they didn’t just underscored how little…no, not little, but how they didn’t give one damn fuck about their own people’s lives, let alone others, so long as their race continued to survive.
Cora finally stopped the stagger step dance her mech had been doing to avoid tripping on the dead as the view ahead cleared up all the way to where another one of her Clan Scorpion stars had also intercepted the flow. Others had dropped behind and just ahead of the Yu’kor, and from the battlemap data she was getting, they had already cleaned up there enough that she’d be wasting her time coming back to help…so instead they moved on to bigger targets.
“Alright fellas, as long as you have shield generators working, let’s not dilly dally,” she said to her star. “We’re pushing all the way to the nearest hive.”
“I’m good to go,” the mechwarrior in the Nova Cat said, despite having lost a third of the armor the mech carried, but its shields were now back up and continuing to grow in strength, for the mech’s power supply…a miniature Nash’ti reactor…hadn’t been damaged, nor the conduits feeding the shield generators, weapons, or other systems.
She heard the other three in the Neos acknowledge the same, then her star moved out in formation across a short stretch of clear ground until they caught up with the carnage ahead and had to navigate around the dead or dying bodies there. She didn’t kill any of the wounded unless they attacked her, but most did and she had to pop a few as she passed by rather than risk them recovering enough to go find a Yu’kor to kill.
Her star met up with the one ahead, then another, and another, forming into a large pack of mechs of various types that eventually fought their way into range of the perimeter defenses of the hive…which were few individuals now, but mostly towers and other forms of turrets and bunkers that had living defenses in them. They weren’t as crude as the Hadarak were, but based on similar principles with a decidedly ant-like architecture to them.
The mechs ahead of Cora got to them first and began engaging in long range exchanges, with her mechs rotating as to who took the hits so none of them went down before they got within closer range and began felling the towers. The trailblazer got to them middle of the pack, then pushed on in to the Asferja complex that spanned several square miles. She used her mental interface to divvy up targets in a matter of seconds, with the various stars splitting up again and with hers heading towards the primary growth pods.
They looked like a field of cornstalks, each with between 7 and 12 pods on each stalk, and all were in varying stages of growth, some of which would be opening up every hour or so to release new units. Mowing them down now was the quick way to deal with them, but Cora wasn’t that pressed for time and just passed them by, going for the caretakers that were planting more stalks. Each of them acted like a kamikaze, containing a small sack of acid on their chests, so as she walked through the pathways in the stalk fields, they were jumping on her mech and blowing themselves up to spread the acid.
It was designed into them, and the acid itself would not hurt the pods or the stalks. It was a base-defense mechanism, so she didn’t have to worry about taking them prisoner. She just had to walk around and they’d kill themselves.
Cora didn’t like it one damn bit, but with the Asferja having more than 270 infantile hives on this planet already, she couldn’t waste time here caring for the enemy when those other ones were growing by the day and spawning even more troops.
But by being a lure to the caretakers, she was making sure they wouldn’t be planting any more stalks in this hive as the rest of her elite galaxy went around destroying buildings that thankfully were not alive as some of the Hadarak ones were. These were just biotech, and though it was messy and disgusting, the mechs could take them apart enough that they wouldn’t grow back again without having to dig down to the ‘roots,’ for these buildings were fed via conduits from digestion pits that were not going to be getting any more raw materials added to them.
