Conquest of Earth (Stellar Conquest Series) Read Free Page A

nevertheless could bring down something as small as the sleds they rode. “Where the hell’s our aero cover?”
     

Chapter 3
    Above and behind the assault sleds, Major Vango Markis lined his StormCrow Weaver up on the first Meme stingship even while slowing his time sense by a factor of ten. Doing so allowed for precise targeting, and a fraction of a second after he fired his inline maser, the first shark-like living enemy died in a blast of microwaves calibrated for Meme ship physiology. Shifting to another bogey, he stroked the trigger and sent another stingship straight to boiling hell.
    Around him Vango’s squadron did the same, and dozens of stingships fell to their beams. Unlike the Marines or the Ryss warriors, his pilots were thoroughgoing veterans, both of the battles to defend Earth so long ago, and of the fight to wrest the Gliese 370 system from the Meme. Cool professionals all, they lined up targets and one after another calmly knocked them down.
    Even so, hundreds of the swift little enemy fighters remained. Roughly half turned away from the assault sleds to attack the StormCrows while the rest held their courses toward the assault force.
    “Damn,” Vango said conversationally to his fighter jocks. “I was hoping they would all come after us. Alpha and Bravo Flights, with me. We punch through and hit the bogeys chasing the sleds. Charlie and Delta, keep them busy.” All of his Crows couldn’t dive to protect the sleds; if they did, the lagging half of the stingship group would roll in behind them and crawl up their asses.
    “Roger, Alpha lead,” came the clipped acknowledgements from his three flight leaders, each with eight Crows.
    Vango led Alpha with Bravo flight right behind as they rolled and stooped like falcons through the oncoming formation of stingships. Pushing his time sense up over one hundred to one, the universe slowed to a crawl and Vango let loose with the lasers and railguns in his wing pods. On automatic, the weapons pumped fire into the noses of the oncoming enemy fighters, nice low-deflection shots that could hardly miss, sending them tumbling as the weapons clawed their eyes out.
    The Crows knocked out a score of stingships, but not without cost. “Just lost Red Dog,” Bravo’s leader Tex called, his accelerated VR voice sounding tinny through the link. Vango looked over his shoulder within VR space and pushed his time sense up to maximum, almost two hundred to one. Sending his viewpoint toward the expanding explosion where Red Dog’s Crow used to be, Vango could see nothing left but plasma and bits of wreckage in a spray, so he turned back to the slow-motion battle in front of him.
    “Shit. He’s gone. Keep your heads in the game, people,” Vango replied in a frozen voice. What he really wanted to do was curse the dead man and everyone else for carelessness. Or maybe the stingship had just gotten lucky. The enemy fighters were fast but predictable, not too bright, and they didn’t have the many advantages of EarthFleet’s tech.
    On the other hand, they were dirt-cheap, so that a hundred-to-one loss ratio was still an ugly proposition for Conquest ’s aerospace squadron.
    None of Vango’s pilots used their inline masers, saving full charges for later targets. Instead, they flashed through the enemy formation to swing onto the tails of the other group of stingships, the ones trying to line up on the assault sleds skimming over the surface far below. “Watch the red zone as you come out of your runs, people,” Vango called, referring to the slice of space high enough for the Weapon to have line of sight on them. One sweeping wide-area beam from the gargantuan laser waiting beyond the horizon would burn anything it touched. Titanic enough to gouge chunks out of Conquest ’s glacis, the StormCrows would die like insects in a bug zapper if its sun-hot touch ever reached them.
    The fifteen remaining Crows took shots at the stingships even as the enemy began to fire at the