War's Edge- Dead Heroes by Ryan W Aslesen

Author:Ryan W Aslesen [Aslesen, Ryan W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781098307318
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

“Raptor 4-1, this is Lighthouse 1, turn to heading two-nine-zero, how copy?” came the radio call.

“Raptor 4-1, good copy,” answered Lieutenant Commander Borland.

What the hell is it this time? Likely another cargo vessel interception; she’d performed dozens since arriving on Verdant three months before. But maybe we’ll get lucky. Though she had seen no air-to-air combat during the deployment, calls for close air support had grown more frequent over the past month as the ground war intensified. Firing on unseen targets in the jungle, mere blips on her scope, could never replace the action of dogfighting, but she preferred it to the drudgery of collaring inbound ships.

“Contact. Three-hundred-eighty kilometers. I have a flight of three heavies, Angels one-nine-zero. Turn to heading two-seven-five and intercept. The ships are not responding to our calls. Identify, over.”

“Raptor 4-1 copy. Heading two-seven-five. Angels one-nine-zero. ETA six minutes.” Lighthouse 1—Naval Air Defense Command Verdant—relayed the coordinates to her Raven automatically.

“Raptor 4-1, this is Raptor 4-3, coming up on your starboard,” said Lt Walker, her wingman on the routine air defense patrol.

Borland saw his fighter pull in beside her as they turned and climbed through a layer of thick gray clouds toward the contact.

“I see you.”

“What do you think this is about?” asked Walker.

From Air Station Phoenix, home of the deployed 733rd Naval Combat Wing, the Black Eagles, they conducted several sorties a day, operations ranging from combat air patrol to ground attack, usually as a pair of two aircraft, though sometimes as a formation of four or six. In the atmosphere at present, they also patrolled the space around Verdant.

Unwilling to give up his most experienced pilots, her former CO Captain Crawford had sent Walker with her to the 733rd. I could have gotten a worse wingman for sure. She liked Walker, an excellent pilot and stellar companion. She’d failed to bed him due to an absent girlfriend he remained loyal to, and she had since quit trying. No sense spreading misery to the unwilling.

Borland double checked that she answered on the flight’s frequency and not Air Defense Command’s. “Hard to say. Maybe their radio’s broken or the comm officer is asleep. Could be anything.”

“Yeah, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

She heard the hopeful anticipation in his voice. He’s as bored as I am. “That’s just what I was thinking.”

With her fusion reactor fuel levels currently at sixty percent, she accelerated in a vertical climb toward the inbound vessels. As they left the atmosphere, Tantus-4 loomed large in her canopy display. She couldn’t see the ships of Sixth Fleet orbiting the planet, but they were there someplace. If they were orbiting here, where they should be, I wouldn’t be dealing with this. The entire Verdant action, both ground and air, had to be conducted on tiptoes to get around the treaties and trade agreements between the Alliance and the Union. This was no way to fight a war, but Borland accepted it in lieu of a full-blown conflict between systems, where millions of innocents might perish.

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