Free Star Force: Survivor (SF52) by Aer-ki Jyr

that had dirt piled up on one side.
    Rio waited there, hearing the faint whisper of the
fighter’s gravity drive as it passed nearby without stopping. He froze in place
for nearly five minutes afterwards before even thinking about moving, then
gingerly pulled himself up into a standing position and looked around,
listening intently.
    Finding nothing he moved off, headed back to the main
group to report on the three dead and there being no way in hell they could
cross here.

 
    With no other choice but to move further north, the
group spent the next day trying to get further away from the Skarrons, limited
in their movements by the civilians and wounded. They moved up another 11
kilometers before Rio volunteered for a single scouting mission…one with
spotters deployed high up in the trees so they could scan the skies for
fighters.
    He went in the daylight and didn’t run, but rather
jogged from point to point, taking breaks and hunkering down playing an
imaginary game of Frogger with enemies that he hoped
were not watching. The gap that he was attempting to move across was more than
5 kilometers wide…hardly a choke point, but that was also by design. If the
Skarrons expected them to cross they’d be watching those and not the larger
areas, or so he hoped.
    When Rio made it halfway across he took a long break,
looking around and just happy to be alive. He chanced using his comm on a
slightly longer range and had a brief conversation with the commando on the
forest’s edge as he sank himself halfway down into a tiny pond, with the water
coming up to his chest as his feet got sucked into the muck below.
    There he waited for another 10 minutes, seeing if
anything was coming in after him delayed. When it appeared there wasn’t another
commando retraced his path…exactly. Rio had recorded his movements, putting
waypoints on the battlemap everywhere he had stopped and with his movements
being plotted. On the other commando’s HUD there was a holographic marker that
let him see exactly how Rio had moved and he followed it step for step all the
way out to him…then sunk into the water beside Rio.
    They waited again for several minutes, seeing if there
would be a response. When there wasn’t another came, then another. When the
fifth one arrived, this one being an unarmored civilian, they waited it out
again, with one of the commandos using a small distiller cylinder they’d got
from the emergency supplies to purify a bit of water, offering Rio a quick
drink before he took off. Trailblazing another half kilometer, he set down more
waypoints then hunkered down again in another oversized puddle, with people
shifting more rapidly through both sections.
    Three and a half hours after he’d started his trek
across he slowly moved out of the plain and into the
forest, scouting out the area and finding it clear. He held position there as
the first few others came through, one at a time, and joined him in
establishing a defensive perimeter…with one going up a tree to act as an aerial
spotter.
    Six minutes later that spotter threw up a warning
signal, telling everyone to hunker down as a Skarron fighter flew up the length
of the plain…and passed directly over them. Everyone stayed down for many
minutes to come, but the fighter didn’t come back.
    Slowly people started moving again, and over the next
half hour some 16 made it across…then out of nowhere Rio spotted a Hobbit in
the forest. A split second later it noticed him, with Rio knowing that he had
to act quickly. He took off sprinting towards it, firing his rifle and mowing
it down before it had a chance to report in. He took two plasma hits to his
armor’s shields, but they held up…then he noticed another Hobbit nearby.
    It took off running in retreat and Rio went after it. It
took more than two minutes for him to catch up to it and make the kill, but by
then it was already too late.
    A few minutes later the fighter returned, and despite
everyone on the plain taking