Read Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) for Free Online

The problems didn’t stop you from
running, they just slowed you down, and if you were a badass you could beat a
‘perfect’ person, meaning one without any rocks, by being so much better than
them that your strength outweighed the drag your problems had on you.
    So ‘perfect’ didn’t mean you always won, it just meant
you weren’t being held back by anything. Paul had been ‘perfect’ for quite a
long time now, but that didn’t make life easy. With everything that he’d
learned and all the strength he’d gained it seemed like it was never enough,
and the current situation was proving that. He was holding onto their defenses
by what felt like a thread and wasn’t sure how much longer he could manage it.
He knew he had to take it one moment at a time and play it out, but the writing
on the wall wasn’t good and it wasn’t the fault of any inadequacy on his part.
    Sometimes you were simply outmatched, perfect or not.
    But there was a part inside Paul that wasn’t going to
accept a no-win scenario, if just out of spite. Riona taking the helm for a bit
allowed him to relax enough to head back over to the track and get in a full
10k before hitting the shower and catching an hour nap. After that he relieved
her, made a few adjustments to their orbital positions, then tentatively headed off for some sword work while wearing an earpiece to keep
him in constant communication with the bridge crew or allow him to access a
holographic battlemap with the touch of a button.
    That was how he lived nowadays, always worried about
being caught off guard and knowing the consequences that would result if he
was. But as he reminded himself on occasion, Archons liked challenges and this
was just another one…and one worthy of a warrior of his caliber.
    With that in mind and a little bit of Vegeta’s ego channeled to emphasize the point, Paul kept
himself invested in the moment and fighting the Skarrons, knowing that every
minute he bought for them meant more Sentinels being
built and deployed along the border, which was going to be their long term key
to holding the line.

 

 
    4

 
 
    May 29, 2549
    Rotunna System
(Beta Region)
    Heimdall

 
    Randy jumped up from the ground on the barren forest
floor using his jump pack to get him extra height, then kicked off a tree trunk
to bounce him higher and back towards a tree branch some 20 meters up. He
landed on the half meter thick limb and nearly slid off the far side but caught
himself with his right arm and hung on, then pulled himself up on top and into
a crouching position. He stayed there, alone, and waited for more than 20
minutes before he began to pick up activity nearby, not with his battlemap
sensors, which were next to useless in the forest, but with his Ikrid that he
had extended out in detection mode as far as his padawan range would allow.
    The branch he sat on was barren, for it was underneath
the canopy and leading up to higher foliage, though more or less flat where he
now sat hunched. The moon he was on orbited a gas giant that sat 2nd in line
around the system’s two central stars that bathed it in an excessive amount of
sunlight. The trees here ate it all up, but a considerable amount still got
through their thick leaves and left the forest floor visible and covered with
small plants. In between those and the extremely tall treetops was a dead zone,
for the trees didn’t seem to want to grow leaves in the lesser light.
    That left a lot of branches for Randy to move across,
as he had been doing for weeks out hunting in the forest. Originally the moon
had been a startup colony with some 50 million inhabitants located in two
cities and a scattering of outposts but recently they had all been evacuated,
leaving the planetoid as the playground in the war between Star Force and the
Skarrons.
    Randy had all 9 habitable planetoids in the system
colonized to some level, but this moon had been the weakest link and only
possessed a single Sentinel as opposed to the