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

standard operating procedure, but how else were they going to beat the Hellcats to the rally point?
    The 7-meter fighters ripped out of the bays while Hardway 's junks flew out slow on their four, vectored nacelles before they hit their rear engines to get up to speed.
    Jordo and the Lancers looked down through the bottoms of their canopies to see if they could spot the Hellcats rocketing out of their launch bays on the starboard side. He caught a top view of Pooch's 151 a couple hundred meters below. She flew point on one of three, 8-plane elements. It gave him hot flashes of anger to realize that despite the fact that the Lancers were at full-open throttle and accelerating as hard as they could, the Hellcats were passing them.
    "Bleeding hell," said Paladin. "Do you see that?"
    "They've got faster planes..." Dirty said it with the bitterness they all felt.
    "Same planes," Jordo said. "It's probably their pulse-pinch. They've got better inertial negation than we do. It's probably a 2nd gen system made with the rare elements from 211-Lovis." Might mess up the pilots' heads faster, too, but he didn't mention that.
    Gusher said, "We bled to take that system! Why the hell didn't we get that gear?"
    "We lost thirty-two pilots on that mission," Holdout said. It had been the Lancers' baptism in blood.
    "The Hellcats can counter more gees," Gush muttered into comms. "Not only can they accelerate harder, they can turn tighter than we can."
    "Don't mean shite," Dirty said. "Alien bandits fly superior craft and we still hold our own." Dirty was right, but it didn't change how smug Hellcat 1-1 sounded on comms.
    "Lancer 1-1, this is Hellcat 1-1. Interrogative: Are y'all flying vintage planes? You want us to slow down so you can keep up?"
    *****
    Ram flew in Biko's junk, Gold Coast . Seconds after the 151s blasted away, all Ram could see of the interceptors from the cockpit was their bright pinpricks of burning exhaust. 1000 Ks out, it almost looked as if the Lancers were chasing the Hellcats and trying to maneuver into an attack position of some kind.
    Pardue shook her head in the pilot's seat next to him. "Those zoomies keep it up like that, they're going to kill each other." There was something going on between those pilots and he was well-aware he had no idea what it was. She said, "Makes me wonder what the hell it's like aboard Witt's tin-hulled box carriers with hundreds and hundreds of those Bitzer pilots at close-quarters. They must need riot police to keep order. Or prison guards, maybe."
    A few seconds later, all the interceptors were out of sight. Ram could still put on his helmet and zoom in on them or even project their images upon the canopy of the cockpit module, but he was happy not to have to look at them for a few minutes. Instead, he checked on the junks. Their formation tore across the starry black towards the charred planet's magnetic shadow where Matilda Witt said the target would be waiting, hiding from the very solar storms the junks and fighters now had to risk.
    They'd been lucky so far. Their timing had allowed the junks to fly around a huge arm of the storms without forcing the assault group too far out of its way. The pieces of itself that volatile Pollux whipped out into space threatened to fry them and end the trip fast. The way the OMNI flight computer projected the storms and tinted the hazardous areas of space red, the entire system looked to be filled with fantastic and bloody nebulae. Two-dozen, hard-blown storms of staggering destructive energy and scale swept across the system.
    "All junks," Pardue said into comms, "follow me to 118, mark 022." After they followed her through the turn, she nodded at the electrified planet slowly filling the canopy. "That's the last course correction we'll have to make," she said. "The target is dead ahead."
    The planet's scorched atmo was fifteen shades of crimson. Its sheltered night side flashed and crackled with colossal discharges. Somewhere down there, the