Forged by Battle (WarVerse Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

charging up the center, the enemy would be forced to stay within the trap, or more likely, execute their own plan.
    It was a simple maneuver, one every officer learned at the Naval Academy, but there was no sense opening an engagement with your trump card. It was a game of rock-paper-scissors, and the plays would change a dozen more times throughout the course of the battle. Once the enemy reacted, Johnston could react, and then again and again until he emerged victorious. He rested his hands on the console and looked up. On the view port, the formation was already breaking up as the ships went on their proposed paths.
    A pair of eyes turned on him in his periphery and he looked over. One of the nymphs was staring at him from her command console. Her purple skin and the two dark gray horns growing from her forehead made her hard to ignore. A tingle in his mind alerted him that she was trying to speak.
    
    Johnston did not have to ask how, with no monitors in her workstation, she came by that information. She was connected with several others of her race around the ship, as well as the two that piloted the Chimera ships. Nymphs had a knack for picking up anomalies the sensors could not. The kinds of anomalies that came from portals.
    "Classification?" he asked.
    
    "Tell the fighters to be on high alert. It seems the Separatists are covering up something far worse than a wildfire."
     

Chapter 6
    Vincent
     
    Vincent wasted no time putting the attack order into action. "Reapers on me, switch back to attack mode," he commanded.
    His fighter shifted the armored plates away, giving him an unobstructed view of the field again. In reality, the only change was from total darkness to some pinpricks of light—the enemy bombers were still too far to make out with the naked eye. His sensor's magnification was a different story.
    "Reapers, key in maneuver tango fower." Using the phonetic radio code for T-4, he keyed for his ship to slave its first salvo of missiles to the targets he designated. Faster than he could blink, AMI laid out a set of variables across his HUD, having powered through the calculations. Vincent grunted in acknowledgment, swallowing his distaste.
    He glanced at his weapons and set his blasters to rotating fire, then his Gatling cannon to standby. He lined up a bomber in his sights to paint its hull with a sensor, and when reticule changed from red to green, he flipped up a plastic shield and depressed the trigger beneath. Two missiles streaked ahead of him into the oncoming bombers, while simultaneously, twenty-two other missiles filled the shortening space between ships. Each missile was tipped with a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to wipe out a city, and just enough to be effective in the void.
    The enemy bombers were arranged in cube formations so their gunners could overlap. As the missiles streaked in, the sandcaster round leapt out to meet them. The simple clouds of sand hit the missiles like a thousand bullets, and destroyed any they touched. They couldn't hit them all, however, and as seven of the bombers were struck and destroyed, an eighth took a grazing hit in the port engine and went spinning out of control. The oxygen mix within the ships blossomed into short-lived fireballs in the vacuum, and sent a spray of debris to litter the battle space. A sour taste welled up in Vincent's mouth, but years of experience overrode the feeling—this wasn't the first human he had shot down.
    An immediate spike in the vitals monitor flashed below Vincent's peripheral—no surprise there. His excitement level was just as high as the rest of them. But despite his numerous engagements, and the horror of every death, he still reveled in every twist and turn.
    The bombers continued in their formations, blasting sandcaster clouds out around them like a wall. The more sand around