Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit (15 page)

"Alright," she called over her
squadron comm net.  "Hold tight on me; we'll start a search pattern from
the direction we entered the shipyard.  Warbird Squadron, remove safeties and
arm your torpedoes."

Merritt had been the first Talon to
launch, and had left his other section commander in charge of gathering up the
remaining fighters alongside Avenger once the launch snafu was fixed.   

Cory set in a spherical search pattern
biased towards the way Avenger had come.  She spared a quick look over her shoulder
and saw Avenger in her distressed state.  There was a huge hole, scorched and
puckered where the torpedo had penetrated her aft dorsal hull and driven deep
inside as it blasted through her insides.  It was a sobering sight to see her
home stricken down that way, still leaking the occasional spurt of oxygen and
trailing a streamer of debris as she maneuvered on thrusters into the field.

Her reverie was cut short as her own
scanners announced a new contact.  Among the blue neutral icons on her display,
she saw two red ones.  She was about to declare it a fight worth starting right
now, but then she saw a flood of smaller blips on the screen.  All told, an
even dozen fighter craft emerged from one of the cruisers and swarmed around
the formation. 

And they appeared to have just noticed
Cory's ships.

"Warbirds," she called on the
net, remaining calm in voice but worried in spirit.  "Heave to and fall
back.  We can't take on all those fighters and assault the cruisers at the same
time."  She needed a plan, and she needed it right now.  Her mind raced as
she clenched the flight stick and throttles tightly, eyes darting to her
screens, the heads-up displays and the icons projected all over her canopy. 
She needed to isolate the fighters in order to give her Intruders a chance to
launch their paltry three light torpedoes. 

Even now, the Priman fighters were
closing, and she led her combined six ships as they dashed into the denser
parts of the mothballed shipyard, weaving around huge, silent vessels as she
tried to come up with a plan of attack at the same time.

Finally, she had it.  Well, not the
definitive attack plan she'd love to present to a War College, but it was the
best she could come up with under the circumstances. 

"Merritt," she called on the
combined fighter channel, "I want you to take your Talons and head off in
a different direction.  Just don't head to Avenger; we don't know if the rest
of our fighters are out yet and we can't let those cruisers know where she is
anyway.  Make sure they see you.  I'm going to take my Intruders and have a run
at the second cruiser.  The escort carrier won't have as many guns so it's less
of a threat to Avenger, which means we need to go take a few bites out of the
other one."

"Can I advise you that once again I
don't think you should be risking yourselves this way?" Merritt asked with
a tone of resignation in his voice.  Cory seemed to live a charmed life, and he
worried every time they sortied that one day her risk-taking would catch up
with her.

"You can, and I appreciate it,"
she replied, "but there's no time to be gentle here."

"Good luck," he said simply,
and quickly repeated the command to his Talons before breaking off.  He noticed
the three Intruders duck behind an immense old luxury liner, its immobile bulk
pitted with micrometeorite impacts as evidence of a long service life and an
even longer stay in the shipyard.

Merritt picked a direction and took off,
making sure to pop into view of the pursuing fighters.  He hoped he wasn't
being too obvious about it, but this whole thing would be pointless if the
Primans lost his trail.

Cory held station behind an old ore
carrier, her two other Intruders tucked in close.  The fighters streamed past,
and less than a minute later the cruisers followed, escort carrier first.  Her
active sensors were all in standby in the hopes of not tipping off the Primans,
but her passive sensors were picking up the fire control sweeps of the enemy
ships as their gunners looked for something to shoot at.

Finally, it was time to move out.  One
final check of her sensors told her to not wait any longer, and she pushed the
throttles forward to the normal power stops and hugged the contours of the ore
carrier's hull as she sped toward a rendezvous with the trailing Priman
cruiser. 

She popped over the hull and caught a
visual that made her skip a breath.  Sliding out of the cruiser's obviously
enlarged and modified single shuttle bay was one of the feared Reaper ships. 
The Reaper was a corvette-sized craft designed after the invasion began to
counter the experienced Confederation fighter pilots.  A small ship, with a
crew of only two dozen but studded with sixteen anti-aircraft batteries, it was
meant to escort Priman capital ships.  It depended on them for support, as
well.  With the huge energy demands of the AA batteries, there was no room or
excess power for hyperdrive engines or anything more than basic shield
generators.  As such, they were required to ride along with a larger ship, most
often one of the big command ships or some of the fleet auxiliaries. 
Apparently, that was no longer the case, as the Primans had surprised Confed
again.  This cruiser had apparently retrofitted its shuttle bay to just barely
cram a Reaper inside.  Now, inside the shipyard, it was out and active, ready to
fight off any ambushes the Confed fighters might be readying for it.

Cory was caught in a rare moment of
indecision.  What should she do?  Current doctrine favored clearing out the
Reapers before Intruder or Marauder attacks, but she didn't have time for
that.  Merritt was going to be furious when she made her call.

"Warbirds!" she commanded. 
"Max power; run in and launch now before that Reaper goes active.  This is
our only shot.  Regroup at Avenger's last location."

She pushed her throttles through the soft
stop at the top of their travel, demanding over-rated power from her engines. 
It was only allowed for five minute at a time, and after that she ran the
danger of overheats, overloads, or a complete containment failure.  Risk was
always part of the game, she told herself.

She boresighted on the Priman cruiser and
activated her torpedo's tracking sensors.  A computer-generated outline
appeared around the ship on her canopy to signal that the weapon was looking at
that target.  She looked at the engines and hit a tab on the throttle with her
ring finger, selecting that component specifically.  The weapon was now locked;
every second longer she held it under her Intruder it got closer, would need to
use less fuel to maneuver, stood a reduced chance of being shot down, and would
have less time for Priman ECM to scatter its' sensors.

The Priman cruiser erupted in laser fire.
AA turrets and even her main batteries opened up in Cory's direction.  The
first rapid-fire AA shots began to bracket her, and one hit splashed off her
forward shields.  They'd found the range quickly.  She juked and dodged as best
she could, but her wingmates were near and she didn't want to intrude in their
firing lanes, plus if she pulled too far from the target there was the chance the
torpedo would lose lock and she'd have to start over.  That was not the
preferred way to survive a fight.

She'd reached optimal launch position and
thumbed the launch button as she saw her port side wingman launch his torpedo
also.  There was a brilliant flash from her starboard side, and she spared a
second to check her displays and note with regret the loss of her other
wingmate, torpedo still tucked beneath the Intruder that was now a cloud of
expanding vapor and debris. 

More hits smacked her forward hull, and
the shields drew down enough to let a shot partly through.  It sounded like
somebody had hit her canopy with a mallet.  Warning lights flashed and damage
information scrolled down her displays, but nothing critical was offline.  Her
suit automatically ran a check and declared that it was still airtight in case
she needed to eject.  She noted that one of her autocannons was destroyed, and
cringed at the thought of having to run the cruiser's hull on a firing pass
with only one gun underneath.

She pulled straight up and over, trying
to put the bulk of another decommissioned Caradan ship between her and the
enemy fire.  At that point the volume of fire in the area increased by an order
of magnitude, and she knew the Reaper was adding to the mix.  She felt herself
start to sweat now, insides of her flight gloves getting damp as a bead of
sweat ran down her temple.  She tried to blow it off by puffing her breath, but
it hung there, tormenting her as she worried about the rapid-fire lasers
chopping away at her ship.  She saw the other Intruder catch several hits, spin
in place, and then a dozen bolts converged on it at the same time and it blew
apart as it was hammered out of existence by the enemy AA batteries.

She was almost over the top of the old
ship when the Reaper's fire started to find its mark.  One hit on her rear
shields, two, three more, and the shields were down.  Fire bracketed her now;
in a few seconds she'd be safely behind the old ship and have some breathing
room, but until then there was nowhere for her to dodge to. 

One thunderous impact scored on her
hyperdrive pod on the aft dorsal hull; some of her displays frantically flashed
warnings; some winked off and went dark.  Two more hits, then more, and finally
her starboard wing was severed.  In the vacuum of space, losing a wing was not
going to cause her to crash, but the main roll thruster was out on the wingtip
and her maneuverability would suffer greatly.  That was not going to be an
issue because a half dozen shots hit her ship again and it began to come apart
around her just as she began to clear the top of the old ship she wanted to use
for cover. 

Cory's world changed.  There was no time
to reason out the situation, analyze or even interpret all of her senses.
Everything was just overwhelming; violent motions from her pinwheeling ship
knocked her around in the cockpit, bright flashes from weapons fire, warning
lights and horns, and the beginnings of an explosion consumed her existence. 
Her world closed in and reduced itself to one single thought, one crucial item;
the eject lever.

She reached for it.

Merritt had dodged around space leading
the Priman fighters on a merry chase until he'd been contacted by the rest of
Avenger's fighters, finally launched and formed up for combat.  He'd decided on
the spot to arrange an ambush of his own and was working his way towards the
meeting point, a surprisingly sleek looking troop transport that the small but
proficient Caradan navy used to land assault troops.  It must have a lot of light-years
on it to be parked out here, he thought idly, because the design itself was
still in service.

Those thoughts evaporated as he and his
two wingmen dashed under the ship and out into an open area beyond, Priman
fighters lagging just out of effective range behind him.  A few seconds later,
the enemy fighters emerged into the open and were immediately fired upon by the
eighteen remaining fighter craft of Avenger.  Even the Intruders had wanted to
get in on the act, and Elco had obliged with the realization that while not
meant for dogfighting, the autocannons and high speed of the Intruders made
them effective interceptors.

Several of the Priman fighters were cut
to ribbons instantly, the rest breaking formation wildly to avoid the fearsome
onslaught of the slugs streaming forth from the Intruders.  From there, it was
an old-fashioned dogfight.  The odds favored the Confeds two-to-one, though
Merritt ordered the Intruders to break off as soon as the Primans were on the
defensive.  He knew they'd want to help, but Captain Elco had made a terse
broadcast over the recently-repaired comm system of Avenger to order the
Intruders to regroup and prepare to attack the Priman capital ships when found.

Merritt swept through the Primans,
aggressive almost to the point of recklessness.  Something told him Cory
probably needed help.  She hadn't returned from her run on the Priman cruiser,
and whether the run was successful or not she should have come back by now. 

That moment of distraction almost cost
him as a Priman fighter made a high deflection shot from low on Merritt's port
quarter, and he began maneuvering madly to shake the enemy off.  Several hits
smacked his shields, but they held.  A second later another one of his Talon
fighters rolled in behind the Priman, who was now fixated on Merritt, and
chopped the enemy to pieces with a withering stream of laser fire from his
guns.

"Thanks, Dash Three," Merritt
said humbly.  "I wasn't watching where I was going."

"No problem, Commander," was
the reply.  "You're all clear."  Merritt joined on the other fighter
as his wingman to continue the fight.

"Basic active sensors are
operational, Captain," said Lieutenant Caho proudly.  She turned back to
her screens and began to work her magic, attempting to divine the secrets of
Avenger's information-gathering abilities before the computers were able to
present their own conclusions.

"Where are our fighters?" asked
Elco quickly as he leaned over her chair back.

Caho pointed to two different spots on
the 2D overlay on the screen to her left.  "This big rumble here is where
Commander Elder is engaging the Priman fighters who followed him in."  She
shifted to another location, though there was no data displayed for that spot. 
"This is where Captain Sosus attacked the Priman cruisers, according to
Commander Elder at least.  We haven't received any transmissions or data from
that direction.   Still no sign of the enemy cruisers, either."