Free Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) by Aer-ki Jyr Page A

intent on scrapping the weapon itself rather than the power
supply. Conduits could always be replaced, but the actual array would be more
difficult to rebuild and so far none of the other colonies that had come under
attack had managed to replace theirs…though this one was going to be sitting
here for a long time, meaning they had to wreck it as much as possible.
    They weren’t bringing down the tower. It was far too
big for that and the small amount of explosives they’d brought, plus the fact
that they were still inside. What they were aiming for was wrecked components,
with the fist-sized cubes Iden was pulling out and tossing into the center of
the small room he was crouched in being telekinetically caught by another
striker and pulled inside an open maintenance panel.
    Four other Archons were doing likewise in the room,
with everyone feeding the explosives into the base of the main gun and the
Archon placing them inside at the most pesky spots. To date no one had gotten
inside one of these things to figure out how it worked, for all the other
towers were just being blasted from the outside, but placing explosives was more
about breaking things than understanding them on this trip, so anything that
looked fragile or combustible got a cube stuck to it.
    Iden emptied his pack and tossed the last pair into
the air, seeing them disappear inside the open panel along with a stream of
others as he picked up and reattached the mostly empty pack to his armor. There
were still some foodstuffs and ammo left, but most of the bulk he’d been
hefting around was now gone and he felt noticeably lighter as he retrieved his
plasma rifle and stood guard until the other striker climbed back out of the
assembly.
    “We’re good to go here,” he said, with Iden giving him
a moment to grab his pack before the group headed out. The others were split up
between defending their lower flank and placing explosives in other key areas
nearby, all of which would be on a countdown once triggered.
    A waypoint flashed on his HUD, indicating where Sonya
wanted them to come. As Iden and the others moved down through the defense
tower’s upper levels, which were mostly maintenance access, he saw a countdown
pop up at 15 minutes .There was still a ‘boom’ button that Sonya had, but
should they get out of range of the small transmitter the countdown would take
care of giving the final order on its own.
    Fifteen minutes though told Iden that they were going
to have to fight their way out, and as soon as he got within a level of where
Sonya and Chrissie were he sensed lizard minds coming up from below. Halfway
down the stairs he got a personal waypoint, along with seeing others popping up
as the mage told them where to go, spreading the group out across the level,
for the lizards were coming up at multiple stairwells.
    The striker sprinted over to his position, relieving
Chrissie who headed off another direction. Iden stayed put and gun pointed down
his stairwell for several long seconds, staring at a pile of bodies below
before live ones began to crawl over them.
    He fired two shots into the heads of the pair that
came into view, adding their corpses to the pile and caused those behind them
to stay behind the wall and not try to force their way up until they had
greater numbers. Iden could sense them pooling below him, then a plasma blast
zipped past his head from the flank and hit a lizard further down the hallway
on his level that had seemingly come out of nowhere.
    Chrissie ran by him to deal with it and Iden turned
his attention back to his stairs just as the group behind the corner below
charged up and onto the pile of bodies, clawing their way over them and up the
incline towards him, eating his plasma streaks and dropping dead or injured to
trip up the others.
    But as usual, the tactic was not completely suicidal.
The lizards up front acted as shields for those behind, gaining them a meter at
a time until the horde was almost within touching