COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 Read Online Free PDF Page B

glowing on one side from all the atmospheric friction.
    " Contact, Contact! Squidy warships!" The particle streams from the aliens' gun towers stabbed then waved, chasing the 7-meter fighters, slashing in long, two-second bursts, drawing burning lines in the outermost atmo as four more trios of Squidy gunboats rose out of the soupy atmo and revealed themselves.  
    Most of them were out of effective range, but they fired on the Lancers anyway, forcing them to fly defensive while the aliens blasted themselves out of orbit unopposed. " Hardway, Hardway! " he called out as the Lancers flew between the slashing beams. " This is Lancer 1-1. B e advised you have fifteen, repeat: one five Squidy warships inbound from the 2nd planet."  
    The Squidies waiting to ambush Hardway accelerated faster than the Lancers had ever seen a large alien hull propel itself. "When the hell did they get so fast? Estimated time to intercept is now less than two minutes."  
    "They're going to beat us back to the convoy. "  
    " It’s going to start before we effing get some."  
    " Like hell it is." That’s what Jordo said through grit teeth, but his flight helmet projected the unfolding battle for him in his visor and it looked like Dirty was right. The Lancers had dodged some alien fire in and around Algol’s atmo, but ‘first blood’ bragging rights would not belong to the Lancers today. SCS Araby’s fighters and junks along with other elements of the Hardway air group would be the first to kill Squidies at Algol.  
    The aliens attacked the convoy and led with their biggest ships. The three heavy cruisers took the lead, flying close abeam, narrowing the gaps between their hulls as they came until the tallest of their gun towers nearly came together like cactus spines. They launched warheads together. Over a hundred of the aliens’ flying bombs flew unpredictable, twisting paths, making for the UN and Privateer ships, but without fighters to disrupt the screen protecting the battlegroup, their warheads never made it past.
    The alien bombs blossomed green and lurid as they cooked off under streams of 140mm cannon fire from over 120 fighters and junks. Then, before the hot gasses from the detonations had even faded, the Squidy warships opened up all at once with their guns, stabbing across the vacuum at the fighters and junks, slashing their particle streams in vengeful, extended bursts.
    The aliens’ small bore streams sliced fast across formations of approaching Bitzer fighters and junks. The lumbering 50-meter junks couldn’t get out of the way as fast as the fighters could. Araby’s torpedo junks took more than a few fatal hits, but not before they’d loosed their warspites. A swarm of Mk3 Warspite torpedoes ripped across the blackness, riding blue fire as they hurled themselves at the Squidies.  
    The smaller alien warships, their destroyers, slim frigates and other, less identifiable craft tucked in behind the cruisers as their guns sliced the sky with a hundred different rivers of hyper-accelerated nuclei. Smashed and sliced torpedoes cooked off under fire, blooming bright with mortally wounded fighters and junks, lighting up the Squidies with their dying flashes as the enemy closed.
    The fighters spiraled down the Squidies’ defensive streams, firing on the enemy gun batteries to give the torpedoes their best chance. The F-151 Bitzers of Hardway’s own 99th Wild Weasels pulled away a fraction of a second before the first detonations against the alien hulls.  
    When the new constellation of stars that had risen faded enough to see again, it was clear all three of the Squidies' gunboats had been mortally wounded. They burned from the inside. Fire jetted out the vaped holes up and down their hulls.
    The three biggest ships were done for. They were dying even before UNS Tamerlane and all the big guns on all the UNS ships and attack carriers opened up with their railgun salvos, but those dead, half-molten hulls sailed on without