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time
that went on the trailblazers had just gotten in the habit of obliterating them
from orbit, then sending down skilled teams to deal with the rubble fighting
and subsurface hunting.
    They didn’t like fighting that way, but the lizards
would never surrender. Even now Tom was issuing periodic calls down to the
various colonies to see if they’d relent, but never once in his life had he
gotten a reply. They were intent on fighting it out to the last scaly minion,
and with this planet covered in numerous colonies and billions of lizards, it
made more sense just to blast them from orbit than to go at it hand to hand, or
even with the mechs and aerial craft.
    Tom punched through another shield plate then fired a
second short cleansing beam lance down and into the shield tower, blasting it
apart with one hit as the internal components were vaporized along the beam’s
path and the rapid expansion burst out laterally and popped the tower in the
blink of an eye. The debris rain around the site was an added bonus, but the
trailblazer turned his mental attention to another colony nearby as the regular
cleansing beams began chewing up the now exposed one.
    There were only so many he could hit with the ship in
its current position, but he wanted to remove their defenses as quickly as
possible to get this small region of the planet knocked down enough that the Zeus could move on to the next while
leaving the drones and Ma’kri in place to really hammer it. He hated fighting
like this, for it was almost exactly how the V’kit’no’sat would have gone about
it, but with the lizards being totally intractable it was the quickest option
to take the planet from them, especially considering that they didn’t intend to
use any of the enemy’s infrastructure.
    It would all get tore down and recycled, whether it be
standing or rubble, so there was no disadvantage in taking it apart from orbit.
Tom just hated such destruction, both in the lives and the equipment. When one
conquered a planet the idea was to take over what was there. Wiping out a
civilization was not conquering, that was annihilation. Star Force were
definitely conquerors, but rarely were they annihilators.
    The V’kit’no’sat were almost exclusively annihilators.
    But the lizards couldn’t be conquered. They couldn’t
be negotiated with. All you could do is fight and kill them…or be killed by
them. That was their choice, and unless Star Force wanted to force them into
imprisonment utilizing stun weapons and such, slaughtering them back was the
only way to fight them.
    Star Force had never gone that far, for they always
gave the lizards an out. A chance to surrender, or sometimes retreat. The
outcome was always the same, but it was by the lizards’ choosing, not Tom
decrying they had to die.
    But die they would, for the lizard civilization saw
their personnel as expendable tools. They’d just grow more in a different
location, hoping that these here would do at least some damage to the invaders
before they died.
    And that was the primary reason Tom and the others
chose to use orbital bombardment to raze the surface…to give the devious
bastards less opportunity to find ways to kill a few of his troops when they
did go down to the planet.
    Sashneo was not lightly
populated either. A lot of the higher tier lizard infrastructure wasn’t
present, but in the 221 years since Star Force abandoned this transitional
world they’d filled it with low tech colonies, going for a massed approach
rather than a fortified stronghold. With the fleet Tom had at his disposal,
some 22 Warship -class jumpships and 4
Ma’kri in total, plus the Zeus , he
was going to take the planet regardless of how much they’d built it up, but he
found it odd that this planet had gone down a slightly different track than the
others that Star Force was currently taking back.
    Over the past few decades the map had been changing
drastically. A huge swath of what had been lizard-occupied Calavari