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“None taken,” Shawn almost laughed. “Where is the
primary target?”
       “Just to our stern, sir,” Drake said. “Looks like
the capital ships are too involved with fighting our fleet to worry about
little old us.”
       Shawn nodded to the image. “All right, everyone.
Let’s do it just like we went over in the briefing. Target all concussive and
phillium missiles at the center mass of the flagship.”
       “Locked and loaded,” Nova’s West Texas drawl came
over the headset. “Let’s go put a burr under their saddle.”
       Shawn’s couldn’t agree more. “Swing around,
commence attack, run!”

 
    “Apparently, if you’ve convinced
the powers that be that flying is all you’re ever going to be good at, that’s
when they ground you. And … if you’re really good at flying, they ground you with a promotion.”
     
    -Shawn
Kestrel
    Modern
Military Tactics During the Meltranian Invasion
     
Chapter 2
     
       With his squadron in a
staggered formation, the intended target—an enormous Meltranian
flagship—quickly filled the view beyond Shawn’s cockpit. Like all other vessels
in their fleet, this one looked like an enormous desiccated skull, the discarded
and picked-apart remnants of a galactic-scale beast. At over three thousand
feet long, it dwarfed not only the Duchess of York , but many of the
nearby Meltranian vessels. Large, spine-like protrusions came out at irregular
angles along the dull gray surface, each concealing sensors and weapons
batteries. Along the ventral side, near the large, gaping mouth-like orifice
that served as the opening of the ship’s hangar, two large eye-shaped clusters
sat side by side, adding to the inkling that the entire vessel was—at one
time—a living thing. However, in past briefings, the Kafarans had mentioned
that the resemblance was just that, and had no basis in fact. The “eyes” that
Shawn was referring to were in fact the housings for enormous sensor clusters,
and were his primary target.
       When the target was locked
into his weapons computer, Shawn ordered his people to fire.
       The phillium missiles were,
by their very nature, a concussive ordnance, and not very useful in
fighter-on-fighter engagements. They were simply too easy to outrun. The beauty
of their destructive power—if one could call such a thing beautiful—was in
their ability to destabilize the hulls of nearby vessels. The explosion would
create an enormous shockwave that would ripple and tear the space around them,
causing massive hull breaches and wanton destructive power. They were
definitely something a pilot wanted to fire, and then beat a hasty retreat
before they detonated. As the ten missiles streaked away from the Rippers,
Shawn and his people peeled away at odd angles to the flagship, engaging their
thrusters at full military power.
       On his sensor screen, Shawn
watched as the missiles exploded a microsecond before reaching the Meltranians’
hull. The overlapping wave of so many warheads tore a gash in the large
sensor-eye, and he watched in delight as the entire assembly crumbled and
exploded. 
       One down, one to go.
       “Wowee,” Lieutenant
Santorum screamed. “That’s sure gonna ruffle their feathers!”
       Shawn silently agreed.
However, now was not the time for elation. His people needed to stay focused.
“Keep it cool over there, Nova,” he said, trying hard not to chide the junior
officer. “We’ve still got problems to handle before we can throw a party.”
       “Yes, sir,” came the
dejected voice of the young lieutenant.
       Shawn was about to say
something in response, but knew that anything he could utter would mean very
little until they got back to the carrier. Deciding to save it for later, he
turned his attention to his executive officer. “Raven, we need to swing around
and take out that other sensor cluster.”
       “Understood,” Roslyn said
as her image appeared on his screen. “Suggest we take vector