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victory or defeat. Help them the Elders might, but
they would not carry them.
    Then again, the Elders had only recently returned to
the Voku. What they had been doing in the absence Cal-com did not know, but if
this race, who had been called the Yampley , had been
in a similar situation and not been able to survive in their absence as the
Voku had…
    The thought sickened Cal-com, for if the Yampley were as loyal as the Voku they did not deserve this
fate. Powerful the Elders might be, but the remains on the planet below only
underscored how vast and dangerous this galaxy truly was.
    That thought made it all the more imperative for him
to get to the other servants before it was too late for them. If he failed,
this would be their fate at the hands of the lizards.
    Giving the order without delay, even as the ground
battles on the other planet were just getting underway, Cal-com had his
conglomerate section disintegrate and break up into a number of protective
warships and the Hatomek seed that subsequently
plunged into the ice near to the ruins, burrowing its way down to the surface
and beginning to locate and extract the necessary materials to grow itself into
the world-building machine that would eventually create the defenses to hold
this system against any lizard counterattack.
    Cal-com noted with pride how much faster this seed
worked than previous models, for it was constructed from the new technology as
well, and took very little time digging its way into the bedrock and carving
out a dome in the ice above for the Voku workers to begin grounding additional
supplies within.

 
 
    4

 
 
    February 28, 2735
    Numar System (lizard
territory)
    Sashneo

 
    Tom-008 stood in the nexus onboard the Zeus , personally controlling the
ultra-heavy cleansing beam that the command ship was using in low orbit to
pulverize the lizard infrastructure on the planet below. The defense shields
protecting the numerous colonies covering the planet couldn’t stand up against
the beam for more than a handful of seconds, for it was a major upgrade over
the previous versions, capable of delivering pinpoint destructive energy on a
level that Star Force had never achieved before.
    Tom and the other trailblazers knew the days of the
cleansing beam were coming to an end, in light of higher end weapons projects
coming down the research pipe, but that didn’t mean they’d given up on their
current batch of tech. There were always improvements to be made, and the
‘ultras’ were one of them. Beam width was the same as a ‘heavy’ but the
intensity was ratcheted up so much that only a very dense shield could hold up
to it…or a different matrix that the lizards couldn’t yet produce.
    Regardless, with the ultra onboard his command ship Tom was able to bust through lizard defenses that typically
would have delayed a planetary assault such as this for days as orbital
bombardment hammered each of the shields until they fell, then cleansing beams
or rail guns would take out the exposed generators and primary defensive
emplacements, opening up the bases or colonies to a ground attack or further
obliteration from orbit.
    Odd as it was, throwing a chunk of mass at an opponent
never got old. The physics were simply undeniable, with the rail gun, a weapon
that dated back to the very beginning of Star Force, slated to always be in the
offensive bag of toys, right up to the day when they finally caught up with the
most advanced tech the V’kit’no’sat had. They’d be highly modified rail guns by then, but the principle was sound and
there was no easy way to kill the momentum they produced.
    Ammo resupply was their weakness, and in a situation
like this it made more sense to use the cleansing beams to knock down buildings
along with a few Ka’sevron rounds thrown in by the Ma’kri. In the past Star
Force would have tried to assault the lizard colonies with their buildings
mostly intact, preferring a cleaner battlefield to work on, but the more