Fractured Horizons (Savage Stars Book 2) by Anthony James

Author:Anthony James [James, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

With his warship at full thrust, Recker clenched his jaw and waited for the missiles to come. A flash lit up the rear feed, the plasma light turning quickly to grey as the storm shrouded the flames. At the same time, an explosion of rock fountained from the floor of the impact crater below and stones like hard missiles clattered against the underside plating.

“There goes their second Terrus cannon,” said Aston. “Shame they’ve got a quick reload.”

“We need a sensor lock,” said Recker. “Otherwise this is going to be the shortest engagement of the war.”

“Working on it, sir.”

“And where’s our backup?”

A red dot flickered on the tactical, hardly more than fifty kilometres from the Expectation. The dot vanished and reappeared at ninety kilometres on a different vector. It vanished again and another dot appeared, this time at 120 kilometres.

“Are those ghosts or enemy warships?” Recker asked.

“I don’t know, sir. The storm is screwing with our sensor lock. Gut feel is the Daklan have two desolators in the air, not three.”

Recker was furious to have missed the opportunity to get the first strike at the enemy and he desperately hoped one of the Daklan heavies was still on the ground.

“I trust your instinct, Lieutenant Burner - there are two desolators in the air. That leaves one down and I want you to figure out where it is.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got fifty-fifty coordinates.”

In the circumstances, Recker was happy with a fifty-fifty. “I’ll take us low into this next impact crater to cut out the firing angle of the Terrus cannons,” he said. “We need to blanket those coordinates with missiles.”

This was one of the times when a good comms officer could prove his or her worth, and Burner was up there with the best. Rather than acting as a dumb relay of information between the HPA warships, he could read the situation by watching the sensors and listening to the other officers, allowing him to act and react quicker than an officer who relied on direct instruction for everything.

“Yes, sir. I’ve made the Trojan aware. They’re going to saturate the area with plasma warheads.”

Between them, the Trojan and the Shock and Awe were packing enough missile clusters to lay waste to a city in a single combined launch. It wasn’t necessary to have a weapons lock to hit an unmoving target and a few seconds after Recker passed on his recommendation, hundreds of missiles plunged into one of the impact craters. Such was the intensity, the dust storm was unable to completely obscure the view and it seemed as though the burning horizon gave warning of the brutality to come.

As if fate had chosen to mock this effort to destroy the Daklan heavy cruiser, three red dots appeared on the tactical, each one solid and travelling along its own vector within the dust storm. The closest was at 150 kilometres and the furthest at 200 kilometres. Then, the flickering resumed and all three of the desolators vanished completely.

“Gone to ground,” said Aston.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.