Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars or Worm. They belong to their respective copyright owners. This story is not created with a commercial purpose. It is not for sale or rent.
Chapter 14
=MK=
Part 5
=MK=
14 January 2011
Dragon's base
Canada
Earth Bet
There are many types of shields, created and refined by countless civilizations over the millennia. They served all kinds of purposes, from mundane to life-saving, had various strengths and drawbacks. Some could absorb enough punishment to shatter a world without breaking, others could be pierced with hand-held weaponry. This meant that there were various ways to get around or through shields – from the good old fashioned brute-force approach to being sneaky in one way or another.
The people behind the late Republic, and more recently, Imperial and Mandalorian Shock Troopers, put a lot of thought and resources in bypassing all kinds of defenses in order to safely deliver their charges to their targets. Going past all kinds of shield system was obviously one of the obstacles they had to go around. Ideally, when executing an orbital drop, there would be no shield in the way of the troops – they would be neutralized by either surprise assaults and precision orbital strikes before the systems could activate, previously inserted infiltration teams, saboteurs or friendly agents planet-side. This was true both for planetary and theater shields.
Smaller, tactical devices, which could be activated and charge fast, after the Shock Troopers already executed their drop, required a different solution. Part of it was ensuring that those soldiers would be maneuverable enough during the last stage of the drop in order to avoid usually small areas covered by such devices. However, another solution was much more direct, though it was often a dice-roll if it would work or not.
Among all the active and inert devices and decoys the Vendetta launched alongside her charges, six missiles flew in rough formation between the Shock Troopers and the cloud of chaff, shield emitters, and ECM units preceding them all. When hardened sensors built into those weapons detected the continued presence of a defensive screen, they accelerated and their innards went fully active. Powerful capacitors explosively discharged themselves within their modified warheads and the missiles annihilated themselves while launching precise, short-lived Ion beams, which stabbed into the perimeter of Dragon's base like the bolts from an angry god.
For a full second, the energy shield protecting the base held, valiantly struggling to contain and reflect the unfamiliar energies assaulting it. It drew as much energy from the base's primary reactors as its capacitors could hold and it transformed and directed it through its tinkertech components as fast as it could. In contrast to most tinkertech devices, it was built with unparalleled precision, and Dragon had used state of the art components created by her advanced fabricators. The shield held much longer than an identical device build with off the shelf components, prayer and Shard assistance would have.
However, even her creation couldn't hold long enough. An endless moment before the Ion onslaught abated, the shield flickered out and shut down just before its emitters would explosively detonate under the strain. Six blinding rays of pale light stabbed through, touched large weapon emplacements spitting their defiance at the heavens and turned them into expensive statues.
Emergency systems activated, secondary defensive screens came online and began charging, and a string of weapon platforms dropping among the Shock Troopers detected the lack of a shield before them, consulted their targeting lists and burst, disgorging a hundred low-yield proton torpedoes.
To Dragon's credit, last-ditch defensive fire from half-blind weapon systems managed to tag eight of the incoming warheads. A moment later, nearly a hundred powerful explosions shook the base to its foundations, silencing weapon systems, destroying power sources, and erasing from existence large sensor suites. In one fell stroke, more than half of the defensive fire ceased, with most of the rest becoming less coordinated and accurate.
Only two secondary shields came online, one enveloping Dragon's main server compound, and the other cutting off access to the main generator complex, which was already breached.
The titanic blows did little to stop the battle engulfing parts of the base.
Within the building containing the now cooling primary shield, HK-117 MK 2 was busy fighting his way through a large variety of weapon systems, varied to the need to either demolish or cut his way through. Curiously enough, he could walk past some emplacements, his stealth field working flawlessly, while others could see him without a problem, forcing the Assassin Droid to use his agility, inhuman speed, and built-in shield to survive the incoming fire. In contrast, the various gases, fire, and attempts to freeze any and all intruders, didn't slow him down at all.
Armsmaster and Narwhal weren't so fortunate. They did manage to come close to the primary reactor powering Dragon's base, corridors chock full with liquid nitrogen or turned into slices of hell that even their armors might not handle for long enough, slowed their progress to a crawl.
Meanwhile, their Sith accomplice danced around enough firepower that would have stopped a heavy infantry company in their tracks and methodically dismantling the defenses futilely attempting to take her out.
=MK=
By now, Mags and Dobrynja had abandoned any hopes of directly confronting the cape trying to kill them and were falling back, doing their best to put as many automated defenses and hijacked Dragon suits between themselves and the alien relentlessly pursuing them. Visibility was shit, getting worse by the moment, thanks to weird silver smoke engulfing everything and throwing it into twilight. Their fighting retreat came to a sudden and violent halt when a wave of burning metal and larger things slammed all over the base, with some of the shards pinging off or even superficially damaging their suits, staggering them. The two Dragonslayers just managed to recover, when the ground before their feet shook in an echo of the earlier bombardment that for a brief moment made them feel as if the world itself came to an end.
Struggling sensors barked warnings, and the two of them looked up, barely able to see anything through the silver haze. Only the disturbance caused by the steel rain allowed them to get glimpses of fiery skies and what they saw, froze them in place for long moments. There were figures, dozens if not hundreds, soaring through the sky and coming straight at them. Fiery steaks rained in front of them, tearing the heavens themselves asunder.
Mags and Dobrynja didn't know what they were seeing, however, they did know it was bad and that they had to get away, now.
Above them, discarded drop-pods fulfilled their final function – their repulsors went into overload, melting themselves in the process, and accelerated towards the closest active weapon emplacement trying to shoot down their cargo. Many of the improvised KKVs missed, their sensors having trouble handling all the enhanced smoke and ECM thrown by both sides, due to damage or tiny errors in last moment calculations. Many others hit as well, silencing the majority of remaining anti-air weaponry.
The Shock Troopers came descended firing, gliding, or dropping down fast, depending on the incoming fire in their sectors. Their heavy weapons accounted for even more weapon emplacements, leaving the compound's anti-air defenses as a pale shadow of its former might.
A whole company converged on the area where Aria's beacon sang its siren song the moment they began their final approach. As a consequence, the Dragonslayers had to fight for their lives against heavily armed and armored soldiers swarming at them from all sides.
=MK=
Part 6
=MK=
14 January 2011
Dragon's base
Canada
Earth Bet
As the CO of a Shock Trooper Battalion, Kole Ordo's job didn't entail shooting at things, no matter how cathartic it could be, after landing and securing a perimeter. He was an officer, and not a Force Adept one, so his direct combat power wasn't enough to make up for any distraction and disruption in command. Ordo glided down, raining blaster bolts at a laser emplacement stabbing at him and his people with lances of bluish energy clearly visible in the slowly dissipating enhanced smoke, and thus refracted and much less dangerous than it would have been otherwise. The blaster shots had to burn their way through as well, however, their plasma had less trouble at this range, and the smoke was optimized to refract lasers better anyway with most people preferring to use laser cannons for air defense. He triggered the short-ranged shoulder-mounted grenade launcher, a nice feature of his heavy command armor, and nicely polished the weapon emplacement, scattering it's burning wreckage all over the area.
Kole landed lightly, using the repulsorlift pack attached to his armor and scanned the surrounding area for any sign of danger. His bodyguard unit converged on his position busying themselves with properly securing the perimeter and that allowed him to properly concentrate on his job. This was one of the nicer drops he participated in, certainly nothing like jumping into a Droid infested hell-hole. Casualties were more than acceptable – just then troopers, who might have been hit because their luck ran out instead because of how murderous the defenses were. That is not to say that the compound hadn't been well defended, it was just that the painstakingly designed and tested counter-measures worked much better than usual, something expected but not counted upon considering the weird technological level of the locals.
There were five more wounded, who now had medics and soldiers ready to drag them to safety converging on their positions, and miracle of miracles, there were no malfunctioning pods, which usually spelled a death sentence for the poor unlucky bastard unless they were Force Adepts. Something like that happened to Mandalore himself once, who was merely briefly inconvenienced, instead of ending splattered all over the drop-zone…
Whatever interference the base defenses provided, it was now almost entirely gone due to the double punch of the torpedo strikes and then the drop-pods converting themselves into somewhat effective kinetic weapons. It took Ordo a few moments to gather in the data fed into his HUD by the command and control systems of his armor, figure out what exactly was happening immediately after the drop and begin issuing orders. He could see five friendly beacons, all moving, though some of them slowly, possibly indicating wounded members of the infiltration team.
"Raider One-One, Raider-Actual, reinforce point Alpha. Raider Three-One, Raider-Actual, converge on Point Delta. Raider Five-One, continue to assist the Adept, Raider Four-One, secure point Beta, that being the building suspected to contain their primary target, the data-core…
=MK=
The first sign Armsmaster got that the Mandalorian's plan was actually going to work, was the intense chatter his armor's communication system noticed and fed his way, using a translator program loaded into it.
"Infiltrator units, this is Raider Three-One, I'm moving to your location with a Company of soldiers, including Combat Engineer element. Sit-rep, over."
"Raider Three-One, Infiltrator One-Five," Armsmaster nearly fumbled with the military call-sign he had to use for this operation instead of his Hero name, which he might not get to use for much longer anyway. "We're at point Delta, you can follow us in through the breach we made. We're being slowed down by the internal defenses and can use engineering support to expedite the completion of our objective. Resistance includes…"
At point Alpha, HK-117 MK 2, experienced the unpleasant sensation of needing meat-bag assistance, because he wasn't fast enough, neither good enough to accomplish his mission, before their arrival. He did report his position, types of defenses he had faced, and either demolished or bypassed and requested some nice high-yield explosives to help him blast his way to the shield and make sure it won't get back up.
Outside, Aria smiled viciously, when the sudden and violent arrival of the Shock Troopers ensured that the base's defenses had to divide their attention between her and the new threat. The results were predictable and not good for automated weapons. There were a lot of soldiers, their shields and armor could absorb a significant amount of punishment, and the heavy ECM they brought to bear, combined with liberal smoke dispersal, meant that most defenses suddenly became much less effective.
Yet, it wasn't one-sided demolition work. Here and there, a Shock Trooper found out the hard way that their number was up. One landed straight in the middle of concealed kill-zone, which hadn't been degraded enough yet and ten different weapon emplacements opened up on her. The soldier did her best to evade incoming fire and shoot back, she took out four of the automated turrets, yet even her armor couldn't handle all the incoming fire. Lasers and railguns burned through her shield in moments, before she began to take hits, which first staggered her, and began to chew through the solid plate keeping her alive. Even as her squad-mates landed in the area and opened fire, a pair of railgun slugs hit the same spot of ablated and glowing armor. The first blew a large crater, however, the now-demolished plate did its job allowing the under-layer to disperse the impact enough to be very painful but survivable. The second hit, coming less than a second later was too much. The under-suit did hold, however, it was unable to dissipate enough of the energy to matter and the kinetic bleed-through was more than enough to shatter even ceramic-reinforced ribs and spread their fragments like a shotgun blast through the trooper's chest.
In the end, she was kind of lucky. The Combat Medic of her unit was on the ball, the Vendetta arrived nearby just a few minutes later and she was merely mostly dead, instead of very dead, when she reached the operating table and eventually would return to service as a fully-fledged combat cyborg, more dangerous than ever.
Two other Shock Troopers weren't that lucky. They ran afoul of Dragon's anti-vehicle weaponry. One lost his head to a heavy railgun slug meant to gut tinkertech tanks, while his buddy got a grazing shot by an experimental plasma cannon meant to take a chunk out of an Endbringer in case one of those showed their ugly heads anywhere near Dragon's base.
=MK=
Mags and Dobrynja found themselves fighting back to back on a slice of hell. There was no sun, only this infernal kind of silver smoke, illuminated by all kinds of weapons' fire. Even their suits' systems found it almost impossible to see through, so they had to rely as much on those as on gut feelings and prayer. Mags waved Michael's sword around, shooting beams of energy from it, hoping beyond hope that the heavy infantry swarming their position would back off. Behind her, Dobrynja's Isaiah should have had better luck – the unit's tinkertech halo was able to automatically shoot at anything not designated as friendly that came within range. Should be was the operative word here, because seeing and hitting anything in this environment was much easier said than done.
As if that wasn't enough to ruin their day, this wasn't like a normal battle. Instead, they were facing mover-blaster-brute combos, who refused to go down, and whatever plasma bullshit they were using, was more than capable of reducing the suits' armor at a distressing pace, knocking out all kinds of systems in the process. The Dragonslayers didn't know it, but that was 'merely' small-arms fire because the Shock Troopers had orders to take them alive if at all feasible, and so far it was.
That part of the battle ended suddenly and violently when Aria emerged from the nasty smoke like an avenging angel, flying on repulsorlift wings. To her credit, Mags sensed something and reacted, bringing her sword in a cracking arc and unleashing a crescent of energy at whatever approached her. To her shock, the energy blast froze in mid-air, close enough to see even in this environment. She got a glimpse of something approaching and without thinking, stabbed at it. The Michael did its best follow her instructions, and the desperate whine of its motors was a testament to that. Yet, the attack halted mid-way, no matter how much the suit struggled to push through an invisible grip that held it in place.
Mags saw an armored figure surrounded by a corona of black, light-consuming energy fly above her sword. Her world cracked, literally, and the upper half of the Michael simply shattered outward as if someone had put a lot of explosives in her seats and detonated them. Mags found herself in the open, choking on the infernal smoke and clawing at her eyes when it got into them and she felt as if someone poured acid on her eyeballs. Only then, blessed darkness came and took the agony away.
Dobrynja saw Mags go down only because her suit was almost touching his back, yet there wasn't much he could do. He was desperately trying to fend-off those damn elusive capes. He didn't know if he was hitting and killing some of them, only for more to attack him, or if all his firepower was useless. In the end, it probably didn't matter. There was only one of him, now he's back was wide open, even though
the halo should have been able to shoot anyone who attempted to be sneaky, and there were too many of the bastard. The Isaiah's left knee gave out, taking one hit too many, and the suit stumbled to the ground, moments before something tore off it's back, exposing Dobrynja to whatever shit had been released upon the base. He felt a sudden and violent acceleration that tore him tore him away from the cockpit. His legs hit the edge of the Isaiah in the process, shattering from the impact. He screamed for all he was worth, before gulping silver smoke and choking on it, which cut his agonized sounds to merely a whimper. Dobrynja had just enough time to feel a hard impact with the ground before the shock and pain knocked him out.
=MK=
Saint stowed multiple laptops in the Victory's storage compartment, strapped himself in the pilot's seat, and activated the suit. It's enormous wings unfolded, crackling with energy and soon surrounded the machine with defensive force-fields. Saint revved up the engines and took flight, wondering if it would be best to try for the outback or the safe-house the Dragonslayers had in the city. The hazy soup covering the whole base, he was sure he could get out without being noticed. Getting away clean on the other hand was going to be harder.
The Victory shot out of the building, flying low and relying on any surviving defense systems to cover hid getaway. With that huge ship approaching, Saint decided that using the city as a cover and shield might be for the best so he headed for Vancouver as fast as the suit could carry him. Only then did Saint spare a thought about Mags and Dobrynja, and called them. Ominously, he got no answer, neither did the Victory could pick up any telemetry from their suits. He cursed and instinctively banked away when sporadic fire from the ground came his way and splashed over his machine's force fields. Threat indicators lit up all over the cockpit and alarm announced missile lock-on a brief moment before fiery streaks rose from the mist and headed his way.
Saint cursed his luck and went low, hoping to use the base's buildings to evade the attack. After all, whatever else was shooting at him, wasn't strong enough to break through the Victory's force-fields.
It was a good idea, it might have even worked, if the Victory didn't freeze in mid-air, and no matter how much he forced the engines, all he got for his trouble was the suit vibrating from the strain. While Saint was still trying to process what was happening, a pair of missiles slammed into the defense field, detonating Ion warheads. The resulting discharge overloaded the shields and pumped the Victory chock-full of Ionic energy, which ravenously devoured any electronics and disrupted electrical systems, thus turning the state of the art suit into an impressive statue.
Saint hit the ground hard, shaking within his metal coffin and screamed incoherently. This couldn't be happening! Releasing Teacher was within his grasp! He had to get away – that all-consuming thought drove him as he clawed at his straps, tore them off, and went for the emergency release. The Victory's cockpit popped open with a hydraulic hiss and Saint stumbled out in the smoke. He tried to run, choked, and stumbled to his knees.
Huge figures emerged from the smoke like ghosts, towering high above him. Saint's burning eyes registered weapons with ridiculous large bores aimed his way, there was a flash of blue light and he knew no more.
=MK=
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