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most of whom were moving around looking
for and setting up ambush locations. Paul flew over them, close enough to scan
with his Ikrid and spot potential traps, but eventually when the surface
survivors were taken care of he had to come down to ground and help the
infantry make their way underground.
    Some of the subsurface infrastructure had been
pulverized by the Ka’sevron cannons, but a lot was too deep for them to hit,
meaning some nasty fighting was still underway for Paul wasn’t going to turn
the machines loose on the rubble with living people still in it…even if they
were enemies trying to kill them at every turn. He also wasn’t going to try to
take any prisoners this go around, knowing the futility of it, but he could at
least give the lizards a fighting death and saw to killing many of them himself
as he took point to ferret them out with his Ikrid.
    Every last one fought viciously to the death, like
always, but in the end it didn’t matter. Star Force lost no personnel and only
a few aircraft/mechs in the ground combat, most of which was due to hidden
explosives. Weeks later, when Paul was sure the cities were clear, he had the ‘ chewies ’ brought down from orbit and turned them loose on
the rubble. The anti- grav platforms grasped pieces
with tentacle-like arms, scoops, nets, and several other contraptions, all of
which were designed to move it up and into compartments on the exterior that
would funnel the junk to interior factories that would mash it up into the
equivalent of dust.
    That dust was then dumped back onto the ground, either
directly under the chewie or off to another location
via a boom, eventually leaving a dune field where the cities had been, or in
the case of the subterranean structures a massive pit filled with the sharp
sand. In other situations Star Force would have recycled that debris, but out
here on a planet they didn’t intend to retain possession of, this was as far as
they were willing to go.
    With the dunes marking the planet like scars Paul
eventually closed up shop and jumped to the next system on his list, but not
before swinging back into the ADZ to hook up with the grid and get caught up
with events, for these purging missions took a considerable amount of time.
With Protovic territory being the closest his Ma’kri swung by while the rest of
his fleet traveled to a standby point near the next target, which he would be
at with only a few days delay thanks to the superior gravity drives that the
newer Ma’kri possessed.
    But when Paul arrived and connected his ship to the
relay grid he didn’t jump back out immediately, for there was a flag on a
message that came from Roger. Knowing that he might need to respond to it he
kept the Ma’kri sitting in place rather than swinging back out to an exiting jumpline as he read the message regarding the Nexus
raid on a lizard core world.
    Roger’s sentiments were dark and mirrored his own,
with Paul physically pounding the arm of his command chair as he read
them…drawing the attention of the ship captain and the rest of the bridge crew.
    Paul ignored them and read on. According to the
reports the ring shipyard had successfully been destroyed, which was a huge
victory and would reduce lizard ship building production by a significant
fraction, but the H’kar had lost 73% of their fleet and the Gfatt had lost 88%
in the assault…and those weren’t drone warships. They had crews on all of them,
and their lives had just been sacrificed in order to achieve a strategic
victory. It wasn’t a last ditch effort to hurt the enemy or to save a planet.
This was a planned assault, undertaken by choice, and they’d just traded away
those people’s lives in order to knock out the lizard shipyard.
    From the way the H’kar report read, which they’d
translated and sent to Star Force as a FYI, they saw this as a huge victory and
payback for all the defeats they’d suffered in the past, and the Nexus saw it
as a key strategic victory.