Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) Read Free Page A

further.
    “ I do not know
if we can ,” the Dvapp said honestly. The Skarrons had no walkers in play,
but they were flooding the area with infantry while the big toys from both
sides were off playing elsewhere on the planet.
    “ Slow them down
when they’re crossing terrain, but do not let them mass out in the open. Buy me
time to plug a few holes .”
    “ We will try .”
    Donn nodded and left the holotable ,
walking across the small prefab Star Force outpost and electronically tagging
two other Archons nearby to follow him. He picked up a half dozen Dvapp on the
way and the 9 of them ran out through the entrance and onto the orange/brown
cracked ground that made up the majority of the planet. A few meters out and
they ran up a hillside before sliding in between boulders and making their way
over the varied terrain towards the caverns the Dvapp had indicated.
    It was more than 8 kilometers away straight shot, but
with so many ravines and other topography a straight anything wasn’t going to happen. Donn didn’t have a jump pack,
which would have helped him greatly, because his Dvapp troops didn’t have any.
He only had a few Archons and commandos assigned to what was a low priority
region on the planet that had been basically left up for grabs while the heavy
fighting was occurring elsewhere.
    Only some local ‘troops’ were available, but Paul had
sent him to the region to do what he could while he and the others fought the
heavy opposition in orbit and some 6 different ground sites, two of which the
Skarrons had already secured and built into fortified anti-air havens. With the
Voku disrupting Skarron reinforcements the enemy had abandoned all but six
invaded systems, choosing to throw everything they had at them while leaving
the ground troops on the other worlds to do what damage they could before being
wiped out.
    Donn had come from one such Protovic world that they’d
just finished cleaning up, and it hadn’t been an easy affair. With so much
anti-air fire capable of coming from the ground troops most of them had to be
taken out down low else risk losing a sizeable chunk of your navy to do it from
orbit or the air…and right now Star Force couldn’t waste drones taking the easy
route, leaving the dirty work up to the ground troops.
    That hadn’t entirely been true here, with several
naval strikes supplementing the Star Force troops before a warfleet had arrived
to reinforce the Skarrons’ hold over orbit. Their blockade of the planet had
only grown in number as fleets from neighboring systems had redeployed here to
help secure the ground gains they’d made. Two small Star Force fleets had come
as well, with Paul commanding one, that had kept the
Skarrons from attempting a forced overrun of the 6 Sentinels around the planet.
    That no longer looked to be in the cards, but an
enormous number of ground troops were being escorted down to the surface en
mass and a huge surface campaign was underway. While that was happening the
Skarrons were pushing out to secondary and tertiary regions with infantry alone
and taking most of them almost by default. Donn had been sent to try and secure
one of the regions now coming under assault by taking command of the Dvapp
there and adding a little Archon magic to the mix...though it was questionable
as to whether that would make enough of a difference.
    He’d already reorganized their shoddy defense, for
most of these Dvapp were not soldiers. They were essentially militia rounded up
from workers and denizens that were otherwise simply going to be killed as the
Skarrons came through. Under his direction the past 3 days they had begun to
offer more resistance, but the Skarrons kept progressing forward despite the
many ambushes Donn was organizing against them.
    Recently enemy infantry had been popping up into
locations they had no business being in, with the newly revealed subsurface
caverns giving the Skarrons an underground route to bypass some of the
surprises the