Star Force 82 Hradeiti (SF82) (Star Force Origin Series) by Aer-ki Jyr Page A

slammed by the anti-orbital battery at maximum depression. It took him a moment to realize that there was a lizard ship underneath, crumpled and half buried in the battleship’s hull, but it had obviously pushed the warship up into the firing line.
           “Damn them,” the red/green Protovic swore, immediately punching buttons on his chair’s control console and assuming command of the fleet. With that he opened a comm channel to all ships while sending out his own placement orders and reconfiguring the alignment as he saw fit. Bra’shom hadn’t been an idiot, but Tyree had learned to fight differently and if they were going to get the fleet through this they had to take a different approach.
           “All ships, beware the cruisers diving beneath you. They just killed our flagship by moving it up into range of the city’s big gun. Drag bottom on the sand and push all gravity drives down if they do manage to undercut you. Crush them into the ground. If you drift up you’re good as dead anyway, so don’t worry about the damage to your ships. Smash them no matter what it takes.”
           “Helm, we’re going in. Follow the course I give you and please be accurate,” he said as he ordered six of the remaining drones into flanking positions, being flown by pilots in orbit, while the rest of the fleet continued slugging it out. “Scrape bottom on approach, I don’t care how much armor you grind off.”
           “Are you sure about this?” the helmsman asked, seeing the course just given him.
           “I trained directly with Archons,” the Commander said with all confidence. “I know what I’m doing.”
           “Yes, sir,” the Calavari said as he surged the battleship forward and slightly north, dipping it down to drag on the ground while the drones shot ahead of it and targeted the nearest cruisers. The battleship poured all its firepower into one of them, taking down its shields with a couple of cleansing beam hits then ignoring it at the last moment as a course correction brought the bow around to face the city directly. Speed poured on and the battleship traced a line through the sand heading directly for the outer buildings.
           The lizards saw it almost immediately, but the drones fired on and, in two cases, physically blocked the cruisers via collisions, getting slightly on top of them and using their engines to bury the front edges of their ships down into the sand, pinning them in place long enough for the battleship to slide between the outer buildings, ramming the edges of two further in as the gap became too narrow.
           The shields held up for a few seconds, carving out furrows in the lizard towers before the armor itself began to grind against them, with it holding up far better than the lizard building materials. The battleship forced its way into the city while staying low enough to avoid the big gun’s firing line as waves of wisps suddenly appeared and started firing down on the ship from above.
           Tyree didn’t call for air cover, knowing that they’d be hit with the city’s anti-air turrets as soon as they got in range. No, this was a task for the big ships…and right now they only had 2 battleships left.
           Punching their way through building gaps too narrow to hold the big vessel, the Commander forced his way up to the fat turret that held the anti-orbital gun, parking the front of his ship almost in contact with it and giving one of his cleansing beams a direct firing line at it while the wisps, tanks, and ground-based turrets chewed away at his armored hull plates.
           The cleansing beam shot out, melting through the turret’s armor plates and cutting its way inside while tracking to the left a few meters. The beam cut out, going through its recharge cycle, then picked up exactly where it left off and extending the cutting line a bit further. Again and again it fired while the rest of the