War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer by A.D. Bloom

Author:A.D. Bloom
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The redsuits he'd taken down like bowling pins when he'd flown into the airlock stood against the bulkhead of the landing bay and flipped him off as the unidentified voice of Arbitrage's bridge wished them 'good hunting'. He'd heard that woman's voice on the air traffic control channel for weeks and she'd never once said her name.

Arbitrage's drones tore ass out of the bay and ran in circles around the ship, chasing Burn. He saw them rip across the starry black framed in the bay doors just before all the Lancers launched together with Major Eugene Shaffer in the lead. Shafter turned the flight on vector, and the Lancers followed.

"Keep it in restricted mode," Burn told them. "Hands off the big red buttons until we're in combat."

"Still got mostly cherries here," Shafter said. "They deserve a taste."

"Whatever you say, Lancer 1-1. You are Honcho. Nuggets, you heard the man. Punch the buttons and try to keep up."

Once they enabled the pulsing inertial negation systems, half of the 133rd blasted off screaming with the thrill or fright of feeling their Bitzer's unrestricted acceleration for the very first time. The others screamed from the way the new inertial negation system vibrated every cell in their bodies with what felt like rapid gravitational flux. Jordo whooped as they all followed Shafter's lead and spiraled around the Dingo pack on their way to the rendezvous with Hardway. If they were on their way to die, at least Shafter made it fun.

Near one of the Lagrange points of Mars' second moon, Jordo's knot puckered when his fighter's LiDAR picked out two flights of what had to be a hundred bogies apiece. "What the hell?"

"We're cooked," Cleeg said over local comms.

Jordo's helmet drew a reticule around a set of warning beacons, buoys around the area. The message they broadcast flashed in his visor and tinted the region of space in front of them with red and white stripes: "Navigation Hazard. Do not enter."

Burn came over squadron comms: "Just in case there's a few nervous nuggets out there, you should know those aren't enemy contacts. That's the debris clouds from the Battle of Deimos Lagrange you're reading on passive LiDAR. That's the wreckage of Khan and Hannibal. They drifted into the L-4 Lagrange point and now the debris cloud follows Deimos around Mars – probably will for a while."

Even in prison, he'd seen that battle happen from the view of camera drones and radar telescopes. They'd all watched Humanity lose that encounter. The Squidies' 800-meter dreadnought burned Hannibal from the inside and sliced Khan's hull and her bulkheads until there wasn't a piece left over 5-meters. The ships that met it had been the UNS flagships. They had the thickest armor and the biggest guns. And they didn't put a single hole in the alien dreadnought's armor.

At the recently savaged, but quickly rebuilding Staas Company Yards at Deimos, they sighted SCS Hardway and two other carriers – Pont Neuf and Araby. As the Lancers and their

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.