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had his hands full making as many
ship kills as he could but he kept watching, hoping the Gfatt hadn’t bitten off
more than they could chew…up until the ship finally pulled out from the
station, which was showing a huge crater in its center but otherwise still
intact and returning showers of green plasma fire, including a few streamers
that were really hammering the Gfatt’s still intact
shields.
    The squirt guns ceased as the ship paused several
kilometers out, not firing back at all as the plasma continued to flow,
dampened by the range a bit but still doing damage to the shields when a huge
blast emitted from the warship and sailed into the crater on the station.
    The next thing Liam knew the battle station was breaking
apart into chunks amidst a huge debris-riddled explosion that for a brief
moment appeared like a mini nova down in low orbit.
    “That’s one hell of a finishing move,” he commented
dryly as he continued to issue mental commands to the ships he was linked in
with, keeping an eye on the Gfatt in case they needed support, for he really
didn’t want to have to relay the message that the ‘observer’ got itself killed
in combat.
    He needn’t had worried, for the warship ignored the
incoming cruisers and made another microjump back up to high orbit and waited
there, returning to its altitude perch and watching as Liam finished up his
combat assignments one by one and eventually pulled his ships out of orbit,
jumping to a rendezvous spot elsewhere in the system where he began to consolidate
reports from the ships dispatched to the other two planets.
    They didn’t arrive until later, but their laggy telemetry did and Liam watched as they quickly and
efficiently pounded several orbital and surface sites, using their drones’ rail
guns on the latter and knocking out several lizard mining colonies that had
been funneling resources over to the main planet. The enemy would rebuild, of
course, but the damage would slow them down a bit and right now that’s all Star
Force was trying to do.
    Some might say what they were doing was recklessly
violent and wasteful, that without even trying to conquer the planet they were
just wasting their time and resources, but Liam had long ago learned that the
lizards thrived off of being left alone. They were builders, and in order to
knock them out of their mojo you had to come in and wreck what they’d built
randomly to keep them scared and cautious, otherwise they’d just creep right up
on your doorstep and then start hammering your door from very short resupply
lines.
    That was essentially the problem the Nexus had, for
winning battles wasn’t the problem, it was holding territory. Not their own,
which was more than secure, but the other systems in between that they didn’t
care about or were inhabited by others. The lizards were devouring them and
spreading, steadily growing stronger even without conquering a single Nexus
system. They didn’t have a strong world to be targeted, and even ‘small’ ones
like this, given enough time, would escalate to the point of being formidable
strongholds.
    The trick was that one was not more important than
another. Liam didn’t know about their homeworld, but every other planet they’d
come across was built up in the same way using the same tech and strategies, so
if you hit and annihilated one well established planet or system others would
grow to replace it, often multiples ones for every one you took out…and the
larger the lizard territory grew the more that math snowballed.
    Every ship they killed here reduced that snowball by a
fraction, which was why Star Force and the Hycre were continually hitting them
near the ADZ and elsewhere where they were weak, denying them more strong
worlds by getting at them before they were built up. They couldn’t get to all
of them, obviously, but the region directly around the ADZ was of high priority
to keep ‘weeded’ while worlds like this a bit further out were prime