Mettle by Aer-ki Jyr

Author:Aer-ki Jyr [Jyr, Aer-ki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

Above Luna the three Star Force warships ran their engines up to full power, forcing their way across the orbital paths in a more or less straight line, building up an insane amount of momentum in order to try and intercept the Chinese dropships before they got out of range…knowing that their closure rates were far too high for a decent weapons lock, taking the rail guns and lasers out of the equation.

As one of the corvettes approached the area where three of the slower Solaris Industries-manufactured dropships were beginning to rotate around to align for their descent burns, it opened its protective armor plating over top of its missile racks and slammed in its forward engines, attempting to bleed off as much momentum as they could as the ship slipped beneath the dropships’ altitude and shot by underneath as fast as a bullet.

Using radar installations in orbit, the corvette’s pilot tagged the three dropships as targets and launched all of his missiles up towards the where the enemy was going to be and watched them disappear into the distance.

Each of the missiles had been reprogrammed for the unusual intercept, using their thrust to slow their approach rather than accelerate towards the target, given that they were already approaching too fast to assure good hits or even detonations, meaning they had actually been launched away from the dropships and were now sliding backwards toward them, trying desperately to slow themselves down.

It didn’t happen in time, and the missiles passed by the dropships like drops of rain heading down to the moon’s surface, as the corvette sped off towards the horizon ahead of them, soon to disappear from sight entirely. The little raindrops, however, still had fuel left and continued to bleed off speed on the other side, essentially sitting them in place below the dropships as they came down towards them.

The ‘pause’ didn’t last long and the missiles began to inch their way back up, tracking the dropships thanks to the orbital radar relay, now that the corvette was obscured by the curve of the moon. They began to adjust course to target each of the dropships when their fuel ran out, one at a time in the sequence that they had been fired.

The missiles passed by the dropships harmlessly as they began their descent burns…save for the last few launched, which the corvette had bled a bit more speed off from, saving that little bit extra amount of fuel. They too ran out before impact, but they were close enough that several coasted into their targets and detonated against the hulls of two of the dropships, cracking them open to space in a hail of debris.

That debris shredded the interiors, killing some of the crew and troops on impact, then exposing the rest of them to the explosive decompression of space. One of the dropships shredded under the impact of two missiles, while the other was hit by three, with enough auxiliary damage to detonate the fuel cells, utterly

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