"I can send scouts, though," he mused. He looked at the vast, dark horizon. "I need to draw a map of this world—of the dangerous zones, the natural anomalies, and the distribution of the Hescos population of towns and cities."
If he couldn't move his entire legion, he would instead flood the atmosphere with his smaller, more agile eyes. He knew that even if the lethal daytime returned, these ships wouldn't be in grave danger as long as they didn't fly directly into the maw of a specialised predator or another localised black sphere pressure zone. He was willing to sacrifice a great deal of them to get the intelligence he needed.
He didn't hold back. He unleashed hundreds of thousands of small ships, a move so massive it emptied nearly twenty percent of his grand fleet's reserves of small-class vessels. He gave them one single, absolute order: Scan and draw maps, do not engage in combat, and escape at the first sign of danger.
