The Son Returns (Alien Ship for Sale Book 3) by Miles Rozak

Author:Miles Rozak [Rozak, Miles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Several tense seconds passed before Verren's stern voice shouted back. "Echo Leader, this is Valkyrie Actual! My fleet has the rest of Yakuza pinned down on the far side of the field. Scrambling support now but you need to draw back and avoid engagement until the cavalry arrives. Acknowledge!"

"No!" I said. "We are under fire!"

"Roger Echo Leader, disengage and withdraw! Reinforcements are inbound."

Our cockpit shuddered violently as chunks of asteroid ricocheted off our hull. Through the canopy, laser fire lit up the void in blinding flashes of red and green. My harness straps dug into my shoulders as I yanked us into an evasive roll.

The g-forces pressed me into the seat. "Evasive maneuvers!" I eked out, willing my brain to not go unconscious. My eyes darted between HUD warnings turned critical and the enemy swarm that was on its way.

I powered the maneuvering thrusters, scanning for the slimmest path through the asteroid chaos. We just needed a little room. Lasers sliced through the space we'd occupied seconds before as Kuro interceptors swarmed to engage.

"Don't let 'em pin you down!" I commanded, juking my bird with staccato bursts of maneuvering thrusters and feeling blood in my mouth as I bit through my cheek, trying to lose them between drifting boulders.

The Kuro interceptors stayed glued to our tail with tenacious precision. Their twin thrusters making minute adjustments to match our course changes, but the lumbering Samurai-class destroyers struggled to keep up with their bulkier hulls and slower drives.

The destroyers opened up with throbbing batteries of laser cannons along their broadsides. Each turret's twin barrels swung automatically, tracking our interceptors with pulses from their acquiring ladars. They charged up molten glows before disgorging searing crimson beams.

Particle energy sliced through the void, as the Samurais angled their turrets, stitching lines of pure photons that shredded the asteroids around us into white-hot shrapnel spinning outward in scattered debris.

Proximity warnings blared. Radiation washed over our hull. "Aft shields at sixty percent!" Rubi updated. The fragments pelting our defenses rattled the cockpit violently, making my teeth chatter with every hit.

One baseball-sized chunk glanced off the shielding, sending us into a gut-wrenching flat spin and filling the cabin with strobe-like flashes of the battle outside.

But Hoot wasn't so lucky. Three Zenith laser cannons from a trailing Samurai destroyer locked onto his interceptor's weakened aft shields, and blinding lances of coherent photons carved through its energy envelope, slagging conduits, vaporizing structural supports around the dual-bell engines in the span of a human heartbeat.

The entire assembly detonated in a cascading explosion that crumpled the fuselage and engulfed the cockpit in flames. Hoot's comms channel erupted in a garbled scream of agony before winking out.

He was gone.

"No!" Dabble yelled. "These voiding scum will pay for that!" His voice was tight with grief and rage.

I struggled to remain calm and focused. "Steady Dabble! Form up and prepare to return fire." My words sounded empty even to me. If we didn't even these brutal odds soon, Hoot's horrific fate would be shared by us all.

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