War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan by A.D. Bloom Read Free Book Online Page A

the pale blue plasma flare of Hardway's engines he saw Matilda Witt's ships began to turn to starboard and come about together until they'd maneuvered into a diamond-shaped formation with Taipan at the center. They held station just a few hundred Ks from the Transit point where only sporadically appearing infrared and X-ray irregularities remained to evidence the now closed FTL passage.
    The F-151s swarmed out the bays of the four box carriers. Hundreds of them scrambled at once. They spread out to attain broad air superiority across the system so nothing could get close to Matilda Witt's carriers and her command ship.
    Hardway continued towards the inner system.
    Ram said, "NAV confirms everything in the Pollux system is exactly as reported by recon elements, but comms is a nightmare here, too. There's a lot of adaptive noise spread across our frequencies. We're being jammed. We won't be able to communicate over a few thousand Ks without using IR lasers and line of sight."
    Matilda Witt said, "Most of the sectors this far behind the lines are positively rife with alien jamming craft dropped at one point or another. There's bloody clouds of them in places. Self-repairing. Some follow our ships; some lurk in Lagrange points and foul the spectrum from there. It would take weeks to shoot them all out of the sky. Instead, my fighters deploy a comms relay network as they advance. We use disposable microsats as coded q-comms relays. Can't send or receive much over our network, of course, but besides positional location data and tactical imaging, traffic is mostly one-way. There's no delay and it's secure. Don't you worry about command and control, Mr. Devlin. We've got that covered."
    Dana showed them an out of scale projection of the system and the solar storms ripping across it. "Terrible weather. There's 16, super-X-class coronal mass-ejections underway. The system's innermost planet is currently getting charred by one." Raging Pollux had thrown pieces of itself out into space and a 100-million-kilometer trail of glowing, high-energy particles bent around the lines of the planet's distorted magnetic field, blowing towards the outer system. Viewed in the right part of the spectrum, it looked like a stone in a burning river.
    "It happens often here," Witt said. "Every few days. The enemy has a mining operation on one of that planet's moons and when the weather gets bad like it is now, a vessel evacuates them. They usually ride out the storms by holding station in the magnetic shadow of that planet. They're mostly blind in there." Matilda Witt turned to Ram, now standing on the other side of the command chair where Harry Cozen was still seated. She literally spoke over Cozen's head. "No problems with the modifications to the warspites, Mr. Devlin?"
    Ram lied, "Our engineers have done that modification to more torpedoes in less time before." He glanced at Cozen then. From the little tick in his cheek, Ram could see Cozen felt Witt's breath moving the silver hairs on the top of his head when she exhaled out her nose. It annoyed the hell out him, but he wasn't about to get up out of that command chair and let Witt have it.
    "And the junks carrying the boarding parties?" she asked.
    "Two gunnery junks configured for boarding," Ram said. "Each one will have a knuckledragger mech with them and squads commanded by officers and senior NCOs who've already been inside a Squidy ship."
    Witt said, "You must mean Chiefs Hollis and Tse," she said. "From the incident on Moriah."
    "And don't forget Mr. Devlin," Cozen added, "Our Mr. Devlin will be leading the boarding parties himself."
     *****
    "133rd Lancers and 55th Hellcats, Hardway AT has you cleared to launch."
    "Lancers copy, Hardway ."
    "Hellcats copy that."
    "Vector 152 flat to assembly and proceed. Good hunting."
    The 133rd blasted out of the bay together and accelerated so hard that if they hadn't enabled the inertial negation early, then the g-forces would have killed them. It wasn't