Star Force: Probe (SF42)

  There was no voice, just music…but it was absolutely the best sound he had ever heard. An unrestrainable grin crept over his face as he picked one of the few Skarron fighters remaining and headed for it as he listened to the repetitive ‘Imperial March’ playing nonstop on the comm, which a quick glance at the battlemap confirmed was being transmitted from orbit.

  “All drones are free.”

  “Heavy cruisers concentrate fire on the juggernauts,” Tim-410 said as his flagship sat on the upper edge of low orbit along with 14 other Star Force jumpships, all of which were deploying warships that the Skarron fleet was maneuvering to intercept…but as they did more jumpships came in, microjumping from the star directly into planetary orbit and arriving on precise points fed to them by Tim’s command crew.

  Each of the jumpships spewed warships, with the count escalating gradually but consistently, with the Skarrons not knowing how many were incoming.

  But Tim did, crossing over to the command nexus after seeing the enemy fleet’s layout. Tweaking his own fleet’s positioning he brought in more jumpships on blocking routes, having them disperse their drones into clouds of armed debris that gradually encircled the Skarrons. By the time the enemy realized what was happening, and that the Humans had brought far more ships than they could handle, they were contained within a hemispherical bowl, leaving them few maneuvering options.

  Inside that bowl was a great deal of carnage occurring on both sides, but all the Star Force crews were safely onboard their jumpships outside the perimeter, with more incoming as the battle progressed, thickening the bowl and forcing the Skarrons down towards the atmosphere as they tried to flee in the final stages of the battle, but they couldn’t get away from the smaller drones. They swarmed the larger ships, using the few IDF equipped interdictors to slow them down long enough to penetrate their shields and force them into desperate microjumps.

  Those jumps ended in collisions with the Star Force ships, which ended in the Skarrons’ vessels disabling themselves in the impacts and falling prey to the drone swarm…but they had no other options, for there were no available jumplines, and the Skarron ships wouldn’t have fared any better going down to the atmosphere, which would have boxed them in even further.

  Tim’s fleet destroyed the bulk of the Skarron assault fleet before all of his 312 Warship-class jumpships arrived, with the remaining enemy patrols ships in the system fleeing with the knowledge of how many reinforcements the Humans had sent, for they stayed around to observe the battle and the full arrival of the relief fleet, including the mass of troop jumpships and their unloading of scores of dropships delivering mechs and aerial craft to the planet to begin countering the Skarron units on the ground that the warships weren’t targeting with orbital bombardment.

  Satisfied that they had the intel they’d been previously ordered to gather, the Skarron ships left their individual assignments across the system and high orbit around Ettiana, each jumping out from the star individually and taking their scouting reports back across the jumplanes over the following weeks until they reached Skarron territory. There they combined their data with those that had returned from Rotunna, and eventually Brenns and Iverie, giving the Skarron leadership their first substantive look at the true strength of Star Force...after which they began formulating their invasion plans for the larger war yet to come.

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