DREADNOUGHT 2165 by A.D. Bloom Page B

serpentine up the towers and hosed down the Squidies' big
guns, secondary explosions lit off, and pieces of the magnetic
vectoring rings hurled themselves up at the Lancers.
    Paladin shouted something on comms,
but Jordo didn't catch it all before Hardway 's next salvo arrived on-target. It
impacted the alien destroyer on the side of its tower and the broad
of its hull. Jordo was so close that his Bitzer got peppered with
bits of molten metal that briefly stuck to his cockpit like mud.
"Pull away!" Lancer Flight One all rotated on their jets and
grunted with the extreme inertial gees as they blasted themselves
on a new course to get as far away from the alien ship as they
could.
    "Dammit, Hardway! " Paladin shouted over the static. His
fighter banked around the Squidy destroyer's now burning hull to
come back on course. " Bloody kill hogs . We could have had that
destroyer. It was ours."
    Hardway came
about. With the alien destroyers blocking Tipperary now out of play, the carrier turned
hard to engage the twenty-two remaining warships of the Squidies'
battlegroup. Bolo's last message told them what already knew.
" Hardway to Banjo. You're on
your own. Good luck."
    As they blasted away from the battle,
Jordo spun to look back. The three alien destroyers burned and
tumbled slowly together towards the planet's atmo. Above, Hardway's Novalifter engines pointed
right at him and filled his vision with starburst. Through the
rays, like bluish sunshine, the alien battlegroup was closing.
They'd already launched warheads. Hundreds of little, pink stars
hurled themselves at Hardway .
Jordo rotated back into his line of travel just as the carrier's
autonomous QF-111 Dingoes launched in a pack and tore hard turns to
intercept the aliens' flying bombs.
    *****
    A few thousand Ks around the limb of
the planet, Jordo caught sight of a burning speck as it passed
between him and one of the planet's darker rings. He added x-ray
and gamma to the multispectral overlays projected in his helmet,
and suddenly, the object below shone like a little sun. It radiated
uncontrolled gammas and sparkled with x-ray bursts over the rings
below. He zoomed in and saw the blurred image of a small craft with
a fusion reactor in slow meltdown. The fighter-shaped lump of
molten metal fell in a degrading orbit. He knew what it was. He
just didn't know who it was.
Jordo said, "Is it Hardy or Shotz?"
    Paladin said, "I got eyes on Shotz a couple
of Ks out. He doesn't look good." He pitched and tilted and
half-rolled to point his cannon at an object in higher orbit. Then,
Jordo saw it. It was only half a hull and it had been mostly
melted, but it was clearly the wreck of a Bitzer 151.
    "Hardy and Shotz," Dirty said. "RIP
mutherfuckers."
    "And then, there were twelve."
    "G'night, Hardy," Holdout said. "G'night,
Shotz."
    "They were on the way to give Devlin's
boarding party air-support," Jordo said.
    "And they barely made it out of sight before
they got waxed."
    "Yeah, but by who?"
    "Who do you think ?"
    It wasn't the Dreadnought that got
them. The alien battleship was just rising now above the rings of
the planet on the far side and even if it had line of sight to take
a shot at a pair of Bitzers, it couldn't have hit Hardy and Shotz
from a million Ks out. The Lancers searched the black vacuum around
them. They saw nothing but Tipperary and the junks and their own fighters
against the planet, the rings, and the misshapen bolus of the
planet's first moon.
    " Malta to Lancer 1-1. Those wrecks down there from your
squadron?"
    "Roger that, Malta . Advise Tipperary and keep your eyes open. The Squidies'
Dreadnought didn't do this. Neither did any alien warship. We're
definitely not alone out here. Watch out for alien aces. Watch out
for the red bandits."

 
    Chapter
8
     
    Hollis shouted as the Squidies' fire ripped
past his helmet like a mag-lev train. "Where the hell are the
Lancers? Where the hell is our air support?" Ram didn't know what
to tell him so he told him to