Star Force: Shame (SF59) Read Online Free Page A

orbit
with hundreds of thousands of ships that waited patiently. The troop transports
stayed back at higher orbits, biding their time, then when the moment was right
the cruiser swarms descended into the atmosphere and took on the remaining
warships, surface batteries, and anti-air capable walkers all at once, counting
on their numbers to give the defenders too many targets to shoot at, leaving
other ships free to become slayers.
    It was a tactical move that no trailblazer would ever
consider pulling, for the lizards lost almost their entire fleet in the
following 6 hours, leaving two assault pillars, a damaged invoker, and a light
defensive cruiser screen around the troop transports as all that remained aside
from a few hundred of the ships that had descended into the atmosphere and
lived to tell of it. Most of those were damaged and only partially operational,
but 54 of them had somehow come through the maelstrom untouched and were now in
a position of impunity, for all of the Skarrons’ walkers, warships, and surface
missile batteries had been eliminated, leaving them with nothing to defend
themselves with.
    With those handful of cruisers scouring the planet
looking for any defenses that might have been overlooked or quiet, the troop
jumpships began disgorging landing transports that brought the lizard armies to
the ground, and without any walkers to oppose them their tanks reigned supreme
in the ground battles that would follow, with cruiser fire support added where
necessary. The Skarrons did have their aerial forces more or less intact, but
in those troop transports came the lizards’ wisp swarms as well, which flooded
the skies and kept the Skarron fighters occupied long enough for the ground
troops to do their work over the coming 2 years.
    The aerial war proved to be a stalemate, but it was a
stalemate that gave the ground troops the opportunity to press their advantage.
Before all was said and done a few walkers popped up that they had to contend
with, either having been incomplete before the initial attack or down for
maintenance. Those made things difficult, but with cruiser assistance they were
eliminated and the slaughter of the civilian population continued well past the
last of their military succumbing.
    During the first year of major ground battles a
dribbling of lizard naval reinforcements would come into the system, shoring up
the meager defenses there with the assault pillars being redeployed elsewhere.
The damage invoker stayed, mainly due to the fact that its gravity drives
weren’t fully functional, but in large part the lizards’ hold on the system was
extremely tenuous. Unfortunately for the Skarrons this was the regional hub,
and there were no other nearby strongholds to reinforce them from.
    The lizards knew the Skarrons might respond with a
huge force from further inside their territory, but figured it would take a
considerable number of years before that counterattack would come. Instead of
building up the defenses of their captured regional capitol they chose to sack
it, destroying the entire population and then moving on to trash every bit of
infrastructure they could, with that being a tall order given the dense
cityscape that covered the planet.
    It would be 3 years before the counterattack would
come, and it would come like a hammer blow, easily killing the defense fleet in
the system and eradicating the ground troops the lizards still had on planet,
but while the invaders hadn’t seen fit to try and keep their razed conquest,
they had been devoting incoming ships and resources to the surrounding systems
that no longer had their stronghold to receive reinforcements from. Those
systems saw heavy fighting and one loss after another for the Skarrons, with
the lizards once again focusing on claiming a large number of lesser systems
rather than trying for a handful of big prizes.
    The regional capitol was no
longer a threat and didn’t interest them. It was now just a wrecked,
uninhabited