Forsaken Skies by D. Nolan Clark

Author:D. Nolan Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Lanoe’s display showed the twisted horn of the destroyer at a high level of detail now, the imagery built out of a composite of different views from various microdrones and his FA.2’s own sensors. He could make out the ragged scar near its nose quite clearly, enough so that he could tell it wasn’t a rupture in the destroyer’s hull. There was no sign of actual damage, no visible scorch marks or stress fractures. It was as if the ragged gap were part of the destroyer’s design, a normal feature of its shape.

Which just made it stranger that a cloud of debris was twisting away from the gap like a billowing pillar of smoke.

“Maybe we were right after all,” Zhang said. “Maybe it did get hit by a meteor or something and now it’s breaking up.”

“Maybe,” Lanoe said. He couldn’t get past the overwhelming feeling of dread he felt, though. The feeling that the enemy was surprising them once again.

Especially when a second burst of debris erupted from farther back along the destroyer’s flank, a whole new cloud billowing from its side.

“No,” he said, because suddenly he knew exactly what he was looking at. “No, it can’t be…”

He tapped at a virtual keyboard and magnified the view until it grew rough and pixilated, until he could just make out individual pieces of the debris cloud. And saw exactly what he expected to see.

“Fellows,” Maggs called, “not be an alarmist, but is that smoke plume…turning? Rather heading in our direction, I think.”

Lanoe shared the magnified view with the other two pilots. “That isn’t debris,” he said. “Those aren’t chunks of the destroyer falling off. Those are scouts being launched.”

A third column of them came boiling off the destroyer, a jet of tiny ships pushing toward them. Every single piece of “debris” was a scout breaking away from its perch on the destroyer.

Which wasn’t, in fact, a destroyer at all. It was a carrier. The entire skin of the enemy ship was covered in scouts and interceptors and now all of them were deploying, headed straight for the three human fighters.

“Spread out!” Lanoe said. “We’ve got incoming!”

Dead ahead, along an arc fifty kilometers wide, the entire sky was full of enemy craft. Every single one of them accelerating in Lanoe’s direction.

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