Once the Broadsword acknowledged they received the new orders, Jackson turned his attention back to the Marine op unfolding on the main display. The Saber had been brought in just above and ahead of the orbital docks so Colonel Beck's teams would have an easier time decelerating and descending towards the sections they were going to breach.

They'd decided to just hit the main dock and secure it for now. If the others become an issue, the Saber was ready to blow them out of the sky. Jackson’s patience was running thin at this point, and he was ready to take decisive action to purge the enemy from this star system.

"Assault shuttles have anchored onto the hull…commencing with breach," OPS reported.

On the main display, four different bodycam feeds came up, one of them belonging to Colonel Beck. Jackson watched with interest while also keeping an eye on the mission clock. His modified orders to Captain Risher had the action kicking off on that front within the next two hours. Part of him badly wanted to jump the Saber up to meet the rest of the taskforce, but that would mean abandoning the small raiding party he'd just deployed, as well as the beleaguered Marines down on Exeter Base.

The Saber was also the failsafe option in the off chance Risher met with catastrophic failure and there were no other ships left to make sure the enemy couldn't make it down to the base. Or, barring that option, there wasn't a base left to come to.

"Contact left!" someone shouted on the video feeds.

Jackson watched as the Marines quickly adjusted and exchanged fire with the enemy. Looking at the ethnic makeup of the four enemy troops he could see, Jackson figured they were from Warsaw Alliance worlds. There were worlds in that enclave with populations that were mostly descendant from Eastern European countries. It wouldn't take much work to erase their accents and give them faked credentials that showed them coming from New America so they blended in easily on Exeter Base.

Colonel Beck made short work of the twenty or so surprised enemy troops who had tried to fend her off. The Marines quickly took control of all essential systems and secured the heavy lifters still in the docking cradles, ready to descend back to the surface. The attackers were smart to leave them on the orbital docks. If they'd been on the surface, there was a chance the Marines defending the base could have used them to put a force on the platforms to make sure they couldn't dock a starship to move the finished Bluebird units out of the system.

"Captain we're finishing our sweep of the cargo staging and engineering spaces, but it looks like it was a minimal force holding the platform. There are about thirty-five dead crewmen in the control center who were taken by surprise. Doesn't look like they put up much of a fight," Beck said over the command channel.