Free Star Force: Revulsion (SF70) by Aer-ki Jyr Page B

watching could tag the
locations of the weapons hidden amongst the rocks. The lizards still hadn’t
created a good replacement for their anti-air plasma weapons that utilized
‘fire and forget’ packages, and Mike knew well how to handle the glowing green
splinters flinging up at him from seemingly everywhere.
    Rather than flying up
he went down, cutting under the firing cones of some of the batteries and
letting his superior shields take some hits while he kept moving and dodging
based off of the targeting tendencies he’d learned over the years rather than
seeing and reacting to the weaponsfire that was far faster than his craft. He
kept his speed up and hugged the terrain, eventually sliding up the slope and
peeking over the far side and down into another valley, this one wider and more
heavily forested. The entire area was choppy with washed out ‘roads’ that the
infantry and mechs were making use of. They were visible from the air but the
source of the anti-air fire was coming from the clumps of trees.
    Mike saw them but
couldn’t study their placements, running the gauntlet as long as he dared
before pulling up hard and shooting straight up into the sky, taking some lucky
shots to his right wing stub that didn’t penetrate as he got outside of their
weapons range. The mage rolled his fighter over once high enough above the
terrain that he didn’t need to worry, which was when he noticed a blot on the
horizon to the west.
    A quick check of the
battlemap showed him that the blot was a lizard cruiser coming overland.
    “Where the hell did
that come from?” he wondered, setting a direct course for it while seeing a
drone corvette heading down from orbit on an intercept course. It was going to
be late, though, with the cruiser going to get to his ground troops before it
could get shot down…and with various Protovic settlements spotting the
countryside he couldn’t risk calling on orbital batteries to try and take it
out. Even then there wasn’t much time to get the ships into position. The
lizards had slipped a warship past them and it was going to be here within a
couple of minutes.
    Mike mentally tagged
all the fighters in the air nearby to rally to him as he set course to
intercept the cruiser at least a short distance away from his troops on the
ground. There were 3 squadrons within range, each of which contained 10
fighters. The pilots were a mix of Bsidd Thetas, Eppies ,
and Zetas, all medium to small sized variants, and flying Y-shaped skeets known
as ‘Behatis’ that were about 30% larger than Mike’s craft. They also had three
engines, each on the ends of the spurs, but had a larger midsection bulge than
the skeets did, which allowed even the largest Bsidd variants to pilot them if
necessary.
    When a smaller Bsidd
was known to be the pilot, the cockpit was sectioned off and the excess space
given to modular upgrades, including cargo compartments, additional fuel cells,
a secondary shield generator, comm equipment, or a
variety of other tech to take advantage of the size of the craft. It was a
design concept built specifically for the Bsidd and only a couple of decades
old, but the behatis had already replaced all other aerial fighters in
popularity and was now the only design being actively produced.
    Where the Calavari had
their Valerie the Bsidd now had their Behati, but Mike was sticking with his
skeet like the rest of the Humans, though his was the only one in the sky at
the moment. There were also a few gunships of Bsidd manufacture to deal with
lizard wisp swarms if they were to come their way, but so far that hadn’t
happened. The lizards had air assets on the planet, but since they were the
invading army rather than the defending one those numbers didn’t tilt into the
insane and most of what was here had been chewed apart previously by the
Protovic and their flying ‘Javelins.’
    Mike was in his skeet
to help identify and take out surface targets, as were the other fighters
nearby, but