Star Force: Initiation (SF61) Read Free

ready…not burnt out and stagnant. That’s why he’d taken this assignment, to
get his combat mojo recharged and to grab another few levels of advancement
before it was time to do whatever the Archons were planning.
    But he also didn’t like sitting back and doing nothing
to help out, so this assignment was about damn near perfect. He wouldn’t have
to do anything if there was no trouble, but he was here just in case something
happened and that was an important function, especially considering all the low
level commandos that he was surrounded with. For a few of them this was their
first field assignment, and learning to train without the trials as motivation
was a big hurdle that he was trying to help them overcome…along with a lot of
other things.
    They were capable, as all commandos were, but amongst
the lot of them there was very little combat experience. That’s where he and a
handful of others came in, for if they did come under attack it would be up to
them to lead the defense and carry the rookies through it, making use of their
limited skills while counteracting their lack of experience with his own.
    Orval didn’t think that was going to happen, but
someone had to be here just in case it did and that counted as doing something,
for if he wasn’t assigned here then someone else would be. Right now that
person was out there fighting, so his holding this position contributed and
allowed him to train like he needed to…and that more than made up for the
ever-present phantom chill that hounded him.

 
 
    2

 
 
    March 18, 2692
    Jafat System (lizard
territory)
    Ulmed

 
    With the Star Force fleet largely engaged over the
inner planet of Irad , the lesser defense force around Ulmed was met with a handful of warships that
preceded two large jumpships. With the lizard ships tied up in a battle that
they were easily going to lose the massive transports began moving down near to
the atmosphere with their defensive weaponry swatting a pair of enemy cruisers
that tried to take poaching shots at them.
    By the time they settled into as low of an orbit as
they could half the lizard fleet was destroyed with the others soon to follow,
so the defense shields on the jumpships were lowered and the four aquatics
battleships were released. Their smooth hulls looked quite alien to space, but
they were airtight and had gravity drives sufficient to lift themselves out of
the water and to fly through atmosphere…and those same drives also allowed them
to descend from orbit, with the large ships dropping below the jumpships and
into the upper atmosphere where they began to bleed off orbital speed.
    That friction slowly built into fireballs against the
defense shields covering each of the ships that were decelerating from orbital
speeds using their underpowered gravity drives. Slowly the turbulence around
the meteors faded and their hulls reappeared, with them continuing to bleed off
lateral speed. Two were deep blue colored with their telltale ridges running
fore to aft with the thinner ‘wings’ spreading out on either side but the other
two, while identical in shape, were colored aqua blue almost to the point of
being neon.
    All four ships came down together until they were
halfway down to the surface of the mostly water-covered world, then they split
apart so that they reached the ocean waves at different locations around where
the lizards had established their primary aquatics colony. According to
intelligence reports this world was the second one colonized in the system and
as such hadn’t seen as much development as Irad , but
the lizards had already begun building within the water in addition to on the
small tracts of land. Those water-based troops had to be eliminated before Star
Force could lay claim to the system, hence the inclusion of the rarely used
aquatics division in this assault.
    Four battleships for an assault against an entire
world was light on the extreme but if the lizards had only one, or even