Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series) Read Free

like they were now.
    Damn it, why hadn’t they thought of that before?
    Because tearing
apart an entire ring around a planet in a little over a month is nuts , Paul
admitted. It had probably taken them centuries to build that one ring, maybe
more if it was one of the earlier ones in their empire. But if you were going
to lose it anyway, why not take it apart yourself and put it to use.
    This mission was already a failure, but Paul and the
others still had a job to do.
    He stepped back into the nexus and linked into the
system, getting a couple of messages from his fellow trailblazers that were
variations on curses and facepalms . None of them were
happy, but an initial report from the first boarding party on the Manticore was picking up localized
emergency beacons. Low power and long lasting, the beacons were used to
highlight regions within the ship to rescue crews to allow them to find
survivors in lifeboat-like enclosures or other makeshift sanctuaries.
    That didn’t mean anyone was still alive after the
radiation cooking they’d got in near the star, but if they were only half dead
Paul had a V’kit’no’sat regenerator onboard that would bring them back.
Hopefully they’d be able to pull at least one person back from this ambush.
    In the meantime crews were heading out to do emergency
repairs on the Excalibur while they
were away from combat. The damage was such that they’d need a shipyard to fix
it all, but some band aids could be applied here and there to the massive
construct…and that mass was the reason why Paul wasn’t taking a dip in the star
himself. That, combined with the higher shield strength, had blocked or
dampened enough of the mine hits to allow the Excalibur to survive.
    And judging from the damage reports, she wasn’t just
alive but still combat capable. Not 100% by a long shot, but she wasn’t going
to be a spectator in this fight.
    As the Star Force convoys were continuing to emerge
from their jumps around the system Paul saw the lizard fleets in low stellar
orbit begin to detach and race out towards the jumppoints to engage them before
they could get all their ships here. The fighting was about to go down in a
very heavy way, but Star Force had enough ships in play to keep their footholds
while the rest arrived, and at the moment it seemed the lizards were ignoring
the Excalibur entirely.
    As soon as the Manticore debris was searched his ship was heading back in. Until then his convoy
commanders would be in charge of the fighting, for he was too far away to
suffer the signal lag, making him for the moment a mere spectator while his
peers were the ones calling the shots as the first lizard ships came into
contact and the battle for this system began.

 
 
    2

 
 
    June 16, 3202
    Krachnika System
(lizard capitol/homeworld)
    Middle Zone

 
    Paul hadn’t slept in 2 days, having taken only the
mildest of breaks that amounted to a grand total of 23 minutes absent from the
nexus onboard the Excalibur . After
recovering 6 survivors from the Manticore his command ship had jumped its way back across
the star system to rejoin the fight underway at the entry jumppoint. All 834
jumpships in his convoy had already arrived and deployed drones by that time
and the lizards hadn’t backed off, preferring to meet the invaders and fight to
the death and kill as many of them as they could rather than playing a waiting
game that they knew they would badly lose.
    There were so many ships in play across all 12
jumppoints that even after 2 straight days of fighting there were still some
active lizard ships out there amongst the debris. Paul’s mind was locked on
them, sending orders to a few drone pilots as to what routes to take through
the debris to head them off as the Excalibur sat broken but not defeated amongst a mass of Warship -class jumpships while they all remotely controlled their
smaller, unmanned kin. Some others were out near the combat, but with so much
debris in the area it was easier