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again if a ship’s shields were down and you
landed one inside their hull…pretty much instant confetti. Down side was their
casings weren’t quite strong enough to survive the pass through an invoker’s
energy arcs, but give the techs another 50 years or so and that little problem
would be remedied. Right now the Ka’sevron cannons were more useful in
assaulting larger enemy ships and stations, but like the rail guns they had
limited ammunition that had to be stored before charging. Once the charge was
set the round was ‘live’ and had to be fired, else it’d explode inside your own
ship.
    That made for a volatile weapon, but in the right
hands and the right circumstances it was highly effective, such as at the
moment where each Ka’sevron round was saving some 100+ rail gun slugs with each
detonation within a shipyard facility that Paul was slagging on the surface.
There were two partially constructed cruisers there, and while the cleansing
beams could have cut them up at range, the Ka’sevron rounds made the job oh so
much easier.
    At present only the Ma’kri had the weapons, and that
would remain the case, for the other weapon systems coming their way from techland would be implemented on the drone fleet and would
take them to a whole new level of badass. Those weren’t out of prototype stage
yet, so it’d been decided to give the Ma’kri some extra bang in the interim
with the Ka’sevron cannons…which otherwise would have been reserved for
specialized assault craft rather than the fleet standard.
    The Canderians also really liked the weapon system and
were implementing it large scale. To each their own, Paul knew, but useful as
it was now the weapon wasn’t going to fit in with their long term plans for the
mainline fleet, nor for Clan Saber. A few of the other Clans might dabble with
the Ka’sevrons , as they’d done with other weapons
that Star Force had built and subsequently decided not to use large scale, but
Saber and the mainline fleet were pretty much one and the same as far as tech
went, due in no small part to the fact that Paul was the primary architect in
both.
    The planet that he was current chewing up was yet
another lizard expansion into the neutral zone around the ADZ, this one just
above the Protovic region on the border between Beta and Zeta Regions. No
matter how many Star Force killed, the lizards kept trying to sneak others in,
meaning that Paul and others had to keep mowing the grass or face an
overgrowth, with the lizards hoping they’d eventually grow tired or lax and
allow them to creep up on the fortified region.
    But that wasn’t going to happen so long as the
trailblazers were in command. The lizards were used to rolling over rookies,
and they were anything but. These missions were tedious, and Paul had several
other systems he had to raze/check on, but it was necessary work, bloody as it
was. This one though had to be eradicated completely, for it was too close to
the ADZ to leave anything standing. That was why Paul was willing to waste the
Ka’sevron rounds, because he needed as many dead lizards as buildings before he
sent his ground troops down to clean up, literally.
    Not only would they be hunting down the surviving
lizards they would also be removing their infrastructure…and that was always
easier if it was rubble rather than just sliced up segments. Paul needed to
erase this colony from the neutral zone entirely and not leave anything
remaining for the lizards to return to. Had this planet been deeper into lizard
territory he’d have been content just to wreck it and force them to rebuild,
but unfortunately this one had to become a blood bath…which he never liked.
    The demolition from orbit continued until the last
city was shieldless and devoid of anything looking
like a standing structure, after which Paul took a skeet down from the Ma’kri
and joined his ground troops as they scoured the rubble fields looking for
lizards…and finding many still alive,