Jack of Harts 2: Angel Flight Read Free

through the murmured responses his Cowboys gave him and lifted their Avenger off the hangar bay’s deck.  The fighter rose up to the beam, paused a second as the other fighters caught up, and then blue fusion flames lit the hangar bay.  Jack leaned back as the six fighters rocketed through the bay, shooting past entire squadrons of fighters and scrambling figures in less than the blink of an eye.
    And then they were in open space, utter darkness split only by stars.  He turned to see the bright light of the Ursa Major Star Cluster shining on hundreds of starship hulls arrayed around him.  It was an amazing sight, the largest fleet ever assembled by the Western Alliance.  Hell, it was probably the largest fleet assembled by anybody from Earth, and it was all here.
    The displays came to life, showing a hundred icons belonging to the ships of the Spanish Armada and another fifty for the British.  One hundred fifty more ships showed up with the flags of the other Alliance member nations from Africa to America.  Jack watched Enterprise , Durango , Arizona , and nearly three-dozen smaller American icons fill the plot around him.  Dozens of fighters flitted between the American warships and hundreds more beyond them filled space around the rest of the fleet.  And they were still waiting for the Ready Five and the Standby Squadrons to launch.  There would be thousands of fighters once every ship managed to launch.
    Somebody was about to get a major pasting.  They just had to wait a few minutes for everybody to come out and get ready to fight.
    Jack smiled for a moment, and then the smile died as the plot continued to propagate out beyond the mammoth fleet to show the gigantic wave of missiles swarming towards the fleet’s starboard flank.  Angry red dots filled the displays as the wavefront of destruction approached and Jack’s mind refused to accept the numbers they displayed.  No one could fire that many missiles at once.  No one.
    But the displays refused to reset to more rational numbers and Jack swallowed.  “Ah, frak,” he muttered, realizing that someone really was going to get a pasting.  And it might just not be the people he wanted.
    “All Cowboys, form up and…frak,” he licked his lips as he failed to come up with a good idea.
    “Yeah,” Betty whispered.  “I cut the transmission off before you ran out of words, by the way.”
    “Thanks.”  He swiveled his head to see the five other Avengers taking up position off his wings and let out a low whistle.  The sight of nearly six-dozen more drone Avengers swooping in from above filled him with more relief than he cared to admit at the moment.  They hadn’t used drones when The War started.  There’d been a bias against giving cybers or AIs total command of any weapon platform.  There still was, but necessity as they said was the mother of invention.  Fighters were easy to build and pilots took a long time to train.  The Cowboys were first to start using drones to multiply their effective firepower and the rest of the Alliance was in the process of echoing them.
    A holoform wearing blue jeans and a white tank top flickered into being next to Betty and Jack smiled at the brown eyes of the new arrival.  Standard procedure called for each pilot to be paired with a single cybernetic or artificial intelligence who would stay with him or her until death.  It was a partnership closer than most marriages Jack had ever seen and after nearly three years he understood the meaning behind Betty’s every raised eyebrow, cocked head, or pursed lip.  He might play stupid on the subject but she’d used them on him enough that he understood her as well as almost anybody he’d ever known.
    They could literally predict what the other would want to do before they did it.  That synergy made a dedicated pilot and cyber team into the deadliest combatants to take fighter craft into battle in the known history of the human race.  Cat and Blaze killed six