Star Force: Shame (SF59) Read Online Free

prediction.
    In order to get close enough for the plasma hits to
really register those ships had to enter the kill zone, but when they did they
all did, and like a coordinated swarm of bees they all stung the invoker
simultaneously and from multiple angles. The mass of ships looked like someone
had snuffed out the bright candle for a moment as their hulls ate up and
stopped the energy arcs from cascading from one emitter to another, then there was
a massive series of explosions as the Skarron ships were ripped apart, sending
debris out in all directions like confetti.
    But there were enough ships that didn’t get hit, with
the dying ones shielding them from the energy arcs, that they were able to pound
the invoker with clear lines of fire, targeting the emitters and crippling the
lizards’ primary weapon. Some arcs returned and hit more ships, killing or
disabling them but it wasn’t enough. Soon the rest of the emitters were down
and the big ship was just a giant target.
    Knowing it was doomed it accelerated, plowing into the
Skarrons that didn’t move out of the way. Below it the other invoker pulled
back from the half of the station that it was almost now buried inside and
moved away, taking some more fire as it came within the targeting lines of the
intact batteries on the station’s hull but those didn’t really matter, it just
had to get clear as the doomed invoker rushed in on its own kamikaze run and
rammed the lower orb.
    The big white structure visibly dented as the invoker
buried itself inside, then the concussive force caused that orb to bump into
the other drifting nearby, adding to the damage the first invoker had already
caused. As that damaged chess piece ran up higher in orbit with defensive
cruiser screens rushing down to defend it, the Skarron defense platform showed
only a handful of defensive weapons still online, meaning that the severed and
now otherwise wrecked but still massive structure was essentially out of the
fight.
    The lizards had achieved their objective and now the
area where it had held dominance was free for them to move through and engage
the roaming Skarron fleets.
    Similar drastic tactics were required to remove the
other giant defense stations from orbit, but with great cost to themselves the
lizards succeeded in killing them all and turning the rest of the assault into
a more or less ‘normal’ engagement. They made sure to stay away from the
atmosphere and extreme low orbit, but eventually the Skarron warships retreated
there, into the firing range of their surface defenses, and created a
stalemate.
    The lizards waited, knowing that going down there
would have been needless suicide, so they took possession of orbit and hunted
down and destroyed all the damaged Skarron ships and took out their remaining
orbital infrastructure in the coming weeks, taunting the remaining Skarron
fleet to come out after them but they wisely wouldn’t. Even without the handful
of big chess pieces that had survived, the lizards had the remaining Skarron
ships outnumbered, so a naval fight to try and save infrastructure that they
knew they couldn’t protect would serve no purpose.
    But on the other hand the lizards didn’t have anywhere
near enough ships to assault the planet itself and the Skarrons knew it, so
they preferred to preserve their remaining ships and see if the lizards were
stupid enough to press a surface attack.
    The stalemate that resulted would last 9 months, with
most of the Skarron ships entering the system unaware of the assault being hunted
down and destroyed before they could make an emergency jump back out or race
down to the planet past the blockade, but eventually the second lizard fleet
arrived as planned, now augmented with data returned from the initial assault
and the ground troop transports that had been missing from the first assault
fleet.
    The big chess pieces were not present here, merely
jumpship after jumpship carrying an insane number of cruisers that filled