Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) Read Free Page B

Archon had been laying out for them.
    It was to the nearest of those confirmed locations
that he was now running, with two acolytes in tow trying to keep pace with the
much faster Archon. He slowed enough not to lose them while the Dvapp scurried
across the ground like bouncy snakes, moving in a mix of a crawl and leaping
stride as the giant, crystal worms moved as fast as they could. A lot of the
time they’d simply fall on the rocks rather than try and step around them,
melting into the crevices and moving past in a partially liquid fashion, but
over flat ground they couldn’t keep up with Donn and were just barely managing
over the varied terrain.
    Inside their bodies they carried their weapons,
suspended in the midst of the crystalline goo as if they’d ate them. Each was a
hard shard about the size of the Archon’s forearm that made up their version of
a rifle that fired a yellow energy beam about 3 times as intense as a lachar.
The beams were long in duration, requiring them to be held on target as opposed
to a quick flash that Donn’s plasma rifle wielded,
but given that the Dvapp didn’t move that fast to begin with they fit their
physiology well and could burn through the Skarrons’ thick skin quickly when
given the opportunity.
    About halfway to the waypoint he’d put on the
battlemap for him and the other two Archons to track towards they met up with a
few Hobbit scouts. Donn broke left and began to flank them as the line moved
forward, then another Archon moved out to the right giving them flankers on
both sides. The striker accelerated on his zigzaggy path now that he had no one
following him and got up to within 10 meters of the first Hobbit, gunning him down
with a quick pair of plasma streaks before he noticed the four more nearby via
Ikrid.
    Heading straight for them he rounded a car-sized
boulder and mowed down the two nearest him with plasma, then kicked another aside before telekinetically yanking the rifle out of the
hand of the fourth. He killed those two within a pair of seconds and moved on,
eventually coming back up to the line of Dvapp that had continued moving
forward at pace, knowing they had to get to those caverns sooner rather than
later.
    Donn eventually got back into the lead position, with
the acolyte coming back as well after dealing with a pair of scouts on his side
of the line. After a lot more running the Archon brought the full scouting
group to a halt, with the Dvapp literally melting into the rocks around them to
get out of sight while Donn cautiously walked ahead as far as he dared, using
his Ikrid and Pefbar to scout ahead.
    On the other side of the hill he was kneeling against
was a large group…too many to hit, but at the moment they weren’t moving. Donn
plucked a few recent memories from the closest of them and confirmed another
cavern exit nearby with more infantry coming up through it and assembling for a
new push on the Dvapp infrastructure further to the south.
    Getting an approximate size on the deployment, Donn
got his scouts moving laterally and worked his way around it, eventually
getting back to their original path on the far side while logging the position
of the enemy troops on the battlemap so those back in the outpost would know
where they were. What little aerial surveillance they had was complicated by
the rocky terrain, and it was possible that the intermittent cloud cover could
block it entirely.
    He didn’t know if this group had been spotted or not,
but it was better that he log it just in case and sent the data back with a
pulse transmission, knowing that if the Skarrons tracked it back to their
location they wouldn’t find them, given that they were staying on the move.
    It took a while and some more dodging/killing of
scouting groups until they eventually got to the entrance that he’d been made
aware of back in the outpost. It too had troops pooling around it, but less
than a minute after the scout team arrived the enemy infantry began to