Jack of Harts 2: Angel Flight (4 page)

Jack shrugged the curiosity away, relaxed back into his seat again, and watched as the “fleeing” ships continued to accelerate.  The wall’s remaining point defense stopped almost all of the missiles, and the missiles they sent back at the Shang continued to prove almost as effective.  The Shang had certainly prepared their defenses well.  Minutes went by with the American ships slowly reforming into a cohesive squadron that wasn’t quite obvious.  The age-old admonition to “fly casual” echoed through Jack’s mind.  They were certainly doing that, if anything could be casual about ships running for their lives.

But that appearance was not going to last much longer.  An invisible point in space glowed on his displays, telling him when the task force needed to turn.  Soon.  He glanced at Betty, and she nodded back.  They were ready.  The countdown appeared, and he shifted his view to Gabrielle.

“You ready?” Gabrielle asked, head cocked to the side in curiosity.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he answered with a smile and placed his hands on the stick and throttle.

“Break!” Gabrielle shouted.

Jack braced and Betty brought their fighter around to face the main Shang formation.  The entire American task force, and the few British ships hanging onto the rear, came around as well with plumes of blue fusion fire filling space around them.  The entire formation came bow-on to the Shang fleet and Jack wondered if the aliens were surprised.  He knew he would be if he were standing in their shoes.  Not that he’d ever wear shoes designed for those midgets.

“All ships, commence bombardment on my mark,” Gabrielle ordered.

Jack smiled at Betty who looked smug in return.  They were still far outside standard weapons range, far enough out that hits were all but impossible.  But that wasn’t the same as totally impossible.  And as he’d shown earlier, sometimes it worked to let fly early.  He wasn’t sure if this was one of those times, but copying someone’s idea was the sincerest form of flattery.

Jack was feeling real flattered.

“Don’t look so smug,” Gabrielle said with a wry smile.  “It’s unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman.”

Jack put on act of looking around for someone before shrugging.  “Where’s the gentleman?”

“Touché,” Gabrielle returned and Jack chuckled.  “Now it’s time to find out what they have,” she added, her tone all business again, and Jack’s displays filled with light codes.  For a split second it was total gibberish and then he recognized the fire pattern.  He smiled in approval.  She wasn’t trying to kill anything.  She just wanted to scare whatever was keeping Third Fleet here into revealing itself.

“Mark,” Gabrielle transmitted and every weapon in the fleet opened up.

Five-dozen Avengers fired with him, along with an equal number of Hellcats and their Mexican equivalents, and even three-dozen British Harriers.  He felt the very fabric of space trembling under the assault.  But it was nothing compared to the firepower of twenty American cruisers and destroyers laying down their own salvos of gravitic might.  The British destroyers fired as well, and while their turret-mounted gravitic cannons were smaller they had far more gravitic turrets than the Americans had spinal gravitic cannons.

The display was truly amazing.

To add to it, the task force missile turrets went to maximum fire rate, gravitic drivers slinging them away from their parent ships.  The missiles came to life, riding tongues of blue flame and coming around to fly towards the Shang formation.  Then they turned off their drives and became holes in space.  It was odd to see missiles go dark like that and an eerie chill moved up Jack’s spine.  There was just something not right about fighting from ranges like this.

Jack finally saw the result of their initial bombardment and nodded very slowly.  There was a gravitic hit on the Shang cruiser vomiting air.  And the displays showed something that looked like a small space station starting to come apart after a primary capital laser cannon sliced through it.  Two hits at this range were enough to impress him.  But that small station worried him.  He wondered how the Shang could have known they were coming early enough to plant actual space stations in ambush.

And then the Shang stopped firing on the bulk of Third Fleet and the brief chill in Jack’s spine turned icy.  “Well, now I feel special,” Jack muttered under his breath.

“You should,” Betty returned.  “I’ve always said you’re special.”

“Thank you.”

Betty gave him a wry smile.  “Are you sure you heard what I said?”

“Every word,” Jack answered and nodded towards the Shang as they fired again.  This time the missiles began to close on their formation.

“Oh,” Betty muttered and shook her head.  “Right.”

Jack shrugged towards her and returned his attention to the incoming missiles.  They were still several seconds out and he glanced over to see their fighter’s gravitic cannons charging for another salvo.  It was time and their cannons opened up again.  The very fabric of gravity twisted once more as the warships coordinated another massive salvo around him.

Then he saw the first of the American missiles come back to life, spewing blue flames as they streaked in to attack the Shang formation.  Point defense networks came to life, blotting them out of the sky by the dozens, but the survivors dove in and exploded in the midst of the Shang fleet.  More accurately, they imploded, becoming miniature black holes sucking the smallest atoms in space into them for the briefest of split seconds, before releasing their hold on gravity and spreading the gathered bits of material out to rampage through the Shang force at significant percentages of the speed of light.

Deflection grids flared and failed, armor tore away from hulls, and atmosphere poured from wounded warships.  The missiles did what nothing else had been able to do in the entire battle.  They penetrated the Shang jamming and gave Jack his first clear look at what the Shang had.  He didn’t like the look very much at all.

The forty cruisers and equal number of escorting destroyers were bad enough, even if Third Fleet would normally be enough to take them down.  But now Jack finally knew how they were throwing so many missiles at Third Fleet.  This truly had been a trap all along and they’d flown right into it.  The small space stations were actually a dozen or so small missile platforms, firing their missiles in perfect unison with the Shang warships.  He wondered how many missiles they had in the ammunition bays.  Then he looked at the display showing the first salvo of closing Shang missiles and let out a long breath.

This was going to hurt.

“Hold on tight, people!” Jack ordered.  He relaxed, counting down the seconds and feeling the twinge of nerves.  Here was a bad place to be.  He pushed the throttle to the left and maneuvering thrusters added a port shift to Betty’s evasion maneuvers.

The Shang missiles screamed in, American and British point defense lasers and missiles reaching out to bat them aside.  But the mere forty or so American and British warships didn’t have a prayer of stopping all of them.  A missile passed by close to starboard, right where Jack would have been if he hadn’t shifted to the side.  Two more passed above him, and an Avenger in front of him ate a missile coming straight for his position.  The Avenger came apart and Jack let out a relieved breath on confirmation that it was one of the drones.

And then Jack lost all sense of time as he began dodging and weaving, adding his randomness to Betty’s maneuvers.  Fighters exploded around him, missiles tore at warships, and the entire American formation scattered and reformed multiple times a second.  A destroyer slid by overhead, gravitic cannon firing in time with the fleet, and three missiles smashed into it, sending it spinning away, spewing debris and atmosphere.  A frigate simply disappeared under five missiles and another Avenger exploded off to the side.

More missiles engulfed a cruiser and Jack focused enough to bring up the name. 
Washington
, the only other
Los Angeles
-class in the fleet, writhed under the assault of missile after missile penetrating her point defense grid. 
Adams
and
Hancock
threw every missile and laser they had at the incoming missiles, desperately trying to save her from destruction.  But one of the missiles must have found
Washington’s
magazines because one second she was there, taking fire gamely, and the next she came exploded without warning.  Jack averted his eyes from the death and destruction, and weaved to starboard without thinking.

“That was Snake’s ship!” Betty shouted as a missile tore at their port deflection grid, missing them by meters.

“I know,” Jack said, pushing the throttle down to send them under another quartet of missiles.

“Snake’s
gone
!” Betty shouted again.

That got Jack’s attention.  He scanned the displays, looking for the right one, and gritted his teeth as he saw it.  That empty hole in the squadron display should have had Louis Mattioli’s fighter on it.  For a second, he didn’t know what to do, the weight of losing another Cowboy freezing him in place.  Then he let out a long breath, sucked it in, and let it out again.  This was no time for grieving.  And Snake’s cyber was going to need something to keep her going right now.

“Jasmine,” he said, and her holoform came to attention on the display.  “Get Natalie and keep her in the game,” he ordered.  Jasmine nodded and he looked back to the displays showing their remaining fighters.  Another Avenger came apart and he winced.  “Better yet, bring her into our formation.”

He looked at Betty.  She nodded in approval.

“I’m on it,” Jasmine returned and Jack pulled hard to the left, barely in time to miss another missile that would have torn them apart.

A display blinked.  He saw five Avengers slide into formation around
Los Angeles
and nodded in approval.  They spat death at the incoming missiles, slotting into the point defense network with ease, and he suppressed a worried look as Natalie’s holoform appeared on his console.  She looked like she wanted to bolt.

“There’s still bad guys that need killing out there, Natalie,” he said, looking into her eyes and gauging her current mental health.  Her eyes didn’t want to meet his and he felt her desire to leave.  “I need you,” he added and pulled up on the throttle as he had another vague feeling that he really wanted to move.  This time, six missiles passed underneath him and
Los Angeles’
point defense took them apart.  Natalie looked shaken, but she licked her lips in response to his statement.  “Do I need to make it an order?” he asked and saw her wince.

Her pilot was dead.  She was technically released from her enlistment, though that officially didn’t take effect until the end of the battle.  But not all cybers had waited that long in the past, and he had personally seen entire squadrons come apart when the cyber just cracked.  He didn’t think Natalie would but her eyes betrayed a nervous terror.  Her world had ended with Snake’s death but she nodded.

“I’m good,” she said in a strained voice.  It was a lie of course.  She was anything but good, but he was willing to take it one step at a time.

“Then let’s kill us some Shang,” Jack said.

“Yes, sir,” Natalie answered, a dangerous anger in her eyes.

That situation taken care of good enough for now, Jack’s attention returned to the larger battle.  Point defense lasers and missiles struck out at another wave of missiles, and he dropped them below
Los Angeles
in time to intercept four missiles trying to sneak around them.  Then another explosion to starboard caught his attention and he pulled back.  An armored plate emblazoned with the name
Monterrey
tumbled past his cockpit an instant later.

Jack set his jaw against the mounting destruction and glanced at the displays.  They were losing ships, but explosions in the Shang formation told the tales of losses on their side too.  The range showed one lightsecond.  They were still too far away for even cybers to generate hits on anything beyond a random lucky guess, but they were getting closer.  If they could weather the missile storm just a little longer, the Shang would be in for a major lashing.

Then hundreds of missiles came to life and streaked in to attack the Shang without warning.  The display blinked a travel path back to Third Fleet’s wall of battle and Jack chuckled as the missiles ripped into dozens of ships and missile platforms.  The Shang had allowed themselves to focus on the smaller ships of his force and forgotten that Third Fleet still had some tricks up their sleeves.  As the Shang redeployed again to guard against that angle of attack, he watched the range incrementing down towards half a lightsecond.

“Initiate fireplan delta in three,” Gabrielle ordered and Jack leaned back.

“Two.”  Jack flexed his fingers and shifted his fighter to the side.

“One.”  Several missiles passed by, clawing for his fighter, but his point defense lasers picked them off with ease.

“Fire,” Gabrielle ordered and gravity turned on its side.

Every surviving ship in what now looked more like an oversized squadron fired in unison once again.  Beams of twisted gravity shot towards the Shang at lightspeed, accompanied by the focused light of massive laser cannons designed to burn capital ships.  The barrage lanced out, arriving microseconds after their last wave of missiles washed over the Shang.  The gravitic cannons hit the fluctuating deflection grids like the hammers of God, overriding their control of gravity and tearing armor away from their targets.  Then the lasers struck and Shang warships began to melt and burn as armor, interior bulkheads, crew quarters, mess halls, assembly areas, and anything that stood between the most vulnerable parts of a warship and outer space ceased to exist as solid matter.