Star Force: Ringworld (SF80) Page 10

  Such numbers weren’t an issue to the Archons and they simply took their time fighting their way through level after level and sweeping them with their psionics to make sure they got everyone killed. It wasn’t the kind of job one liked, but if the lizards weren’t going to surrender they had to be taken out and Paul wasn’t about to leave death boats drifting around the system while they made their move on the shipyard. Others might have, but Star Force wouldn’t if they had an alternative.

  Paul fought clean, and eliminating these battlestations mean taking out everyone on them either through destruction or surrender. Then when they were clear they had a few surveillance probes left nearby to alert them if the lizards tried to sneak anyone back onboard. They weren’t going to get them in working order again, but if you’d tagged a floating junkyard as enemy free it would make a very good place to hide out if you could get there undetected. The lizards might not take that tactic in space but they had done so on the ground before so Paul wanted to eliminate that possibility by placing a few electronic eyes nearby and then moving on to the next group of battlestations.

  Eventually the lizards moved the remaining ones all together after seeing them being specifically targeted. Paul intercepted and delayed some of the movements, but eventually there was a group of 294 left that he had to whittle down very slowly with all the command ships in his fleet poking at them briefly before cycling out to recharge shields. Taking them down was slow going when he wasn’t willing to commit drones to the fight and the lizards knew it, now goading him into doing so or waiting out the months’ long process.

  But Paul chose to wait and poke from range while he sent his drone fleets to start engaging the shipyard ring’s defenses. They encountered some cruiser resistance until Paul upped their numbers, at which point what seemed like every cruiser they had left gathered and counterassaulted one point, forcing a conflict that Paul willingly engaged. He ended up losing 8 drones with 52 others being damaged, but he eliminated all the cruisers that the shipyard had been pumping out up to that point and managed to pluck away the defenses around a specific slice of the shipyard ring.

  Ships in their slips under construction were the next logical point of attack, but Paul held off. He didn’t even have his fleet continue plucking defenses off the ring, rather just guarding stellar orbit and that particular blind spot while he continued to chew on the battlestations.

  Or rather others did, while Paul, Megan, and Jack took a much larger Archon team down into the ring itself and began fighting their way across miles of the facility. There had to be billions of lizards inside the entire ring, far too many for them to kill themselves without camping out here for years, but their point of entry hadn’t been random and one of the support struts was nearby. They fought their way over to it and eventually destroyed the lifts that were running supplies and personnel up and down. It took a lot of destruction for a few hundred Archons to disable it, but once they did they began fanning out into smaller hunter teams and eliminating lizards while locking down entry points and staking out their foothold for the much larger battle to come.

  As soon as the lizards knew they were fighting on the inside Paul guessed they’d be sending troops up the other shafts to counter them in a ground war for the ring. That would be a very messy campaign, but so long as they were going to fight the lizards on the ground eventually they might as well take out some of them up here…and the support struts would actually allow a route down to the surface past the anti-orbital defenses so long as the lizards didn’t blow them up to prevent it.

  But first things first. Paul, Megan, and Jack sought out the control center for this piece of the ring, giant as it was, to make sure that the anti-grav generators wouldn’t be shut down and the whole thing allowed to fall to the ground. As much destruction as that would have meant for the lizards below, he’d expect nothing less if they knew they could take down trailblazers with it. To that end he also had the gravity drives and their power sources secured next, with teams of Regulars assembled from multiple warships and command ships within his fleet to come in and help hold them while the Archons continued to hunt down and further cleanse their little piece of the ring.

  Meanwhile Paul sent the order back to the ADZ to send the army. He hadn’t expected to need them this soon, let alone to be fighting with them, but there was no way he was going to be sitting around and chewing apart this ring for the duration until it was totally junked…and he wasn’t going to crash it down onto the planet either. That was a possibility, at least for the chunk they now owned, but if they were going to have to clean up the planet afterwards they didn’t need to make a mess of it now and recycling this behemoth would be a lot easier if it was still intact in orbit…not to mention that Star Force could probably find a use for it if he was able to capture it rather than destroy it.

  So that was the battle plan he set in motion while the battlestation cluster annoyingly defied annihilation. He wasn’t going to waste drones taking them out the quick way and neither was he going to waste ammunition and time killing the shipyard ring the way the H’kar had. It might seem to others that this was taking the hard route, but there was a difference between being a conqueror and a destroyer, and Star Force were definitely conquerors. This ring was a prize that the lizards were going to be denied, and if Paul could actually take it from them it would be that much more of a middle finger in their direction, not to mention the logistical and strategic value.

  And on top of that, Paul remembered a similar assault by Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars against a space station that circled an entire planet. At the time such a thing seemed preposterous, but here he was doing the exact same thing and for some reason that seemed fitting…even if he didn’t have a lightsaber. That was one bit of tech even the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t figured out how to make, cutting tools aside, but the rest of the similarities held up, even if the lizards weren’t battle droids.

  Though they definitely treated them as equally expendable.

  Paul and the others had a lot of killing ahead of them, even when they received their reinforcements…which would also be a bigger goad to see if the other lizard systems would respond. Destroying the ring might be expected, but if they were going to take it that might just provoke the kind of reaction the lizards were trying to provoke in him against the battlestations…to come in en mass and waste ships.

  As much as he knew about the lizards there was a part of them that was still an enigma and he could never fully anticipate what they would do, so right now he was leaving it in their court. Come in and try to stop the takeover of this station via a massive naval assault or let Star Force fight it out inside and slowly rip one of their painstakingly constructed prize possessions away from them.

  Paul didn’t know which way they’d respond, or perhaps even a third option he hadn’t considered, but one way or another this shipyard was now out of business and the industrial might of the lizard empire had just been taken down a measurable notch. This war was already a long one, and the conquest of this system was going to take years more, not to mention the other core systems and the rest of the rimward half of their empire…but it was coming down. There was a lot of work to be done and none of it safe, but this was happening, with this system and this shipyard being the first big hit Star Force had inflicted as opposed to the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy that they’d been consuming them with up until this point.

  And from here on out, everything was only going to escalate.

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