Lucky's Marines 04 Lucky Forever by Joshua James

Author:Joshua James
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: down7media
Published: 2018-08-30T22:00:00+00:00

33

MIGGS GLIMPSED movement in the sky. She swung Baby around, expecting to see more of the Da’hune platform cannons making a strafing run. They must have finally found their position.

Took them long enough, she thought. These Da’hune were shit on the ground. They took forever to establish their position, did nothing to fortify or defend it as far as she could see. This wasn’t a long visit. They wanted to smash and grab, which made no sense. They’d brought the gun to the knife fight. What was the hurry?

But it wasn’t a Da’hune ship that she saw streaming through the thin atmosphere. It was a Cardinal Order battleship, tumbling end over end. It was a fireball of light, and as she watched, the bow ripped off and started to slow and disintegrate. But the stern and midsection remained a huge, roiling fireball.

No, not a battleship, she thought as she finally got a better look at the profile. It was one of those huge, ancient rail-gun ships. The Tick Tock they’d seen in the hangar. The ancient nuke-powered rail guns had looked as big and menacing as anything she had ever seen, but here it was just a pile of fail.

It tore into the ground with a thunderous roar, only a few hundred feet from where Miggs and Hector were holed up. There was a surreal moment of silence, and then a wave of sound and wind poured over her as the rocks all around them literally leaped off the ground and crashed back down, rearranging themselves as they did so. Miggs and Hector scrambled not to get crushed by the game of throw-a-giant-rock-around-and-see-where-it-lands.

“What the hell was that?” Hector said in a daze.

Good man, Hector, but not the most observant Marine in the Emperor’s service, she thought.

“One of those giant rail guns,” she said.

Hector gave her a blank stare.

“From the hangar, you know? The Reds must have tried to punch through that asteroid field with it.”

Hector frowned at her accusingly. “That’s crazy.”

“No shit,” she replied. “Not my plan, chief.”

She stared down at the cloud of dust and dirt below them. It occurred to her that it had landed much closer to Lucky, Malby and Dabs.

Much, much closer, she realized. They might all be dead.

She wasn’t too broken up about that. Malby she could take or leave. Dabs was a peacekeeper and therefore a coward by definition. Then there was Lucky.

For a moment, she had a vision of that asshat sergeant having an ancient rail gun fall out of the sky and crush him. She giggled in spite of herself. He was probably as old as that rail gun. They were made for each other, she thought. Two over-the-hill pieces of shit canceling each other—

“There they are,” said Hector, pointing.

Miggs pulled up Baby and used her advanced scope to find their heat signatures, then switched to visuals. Hector’s sharp eyes weren’t deceiving him. Lucky was up, or something like up. He looked like a chew toy for a creature with big teeth, but he’d survive.

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