Jack of Harts 2: Angel Flight Read Free Page B

their carrier’s flanks.  Jack and Cat filled out the forward point of the three-dimensional defensive wedge, lasers and missiles scanning for enemies to shoot.  “You’re part of the grid now.”
    Jack looked to Betty and she smiled in agreement.
    “Good.”  Jack reached out to tap one control and his favorite T&J song filled the cockpit.  Well, his favorite song for going into battle at least.  He had other favorite songs for other times, but this one had driving rhythms and a good screaming melody that merged into the battles that often raged around them.  He felt their twin voices suffuse into his bones and for a moment he was a young man, plucking his silly little guitar while Julie and Alex sang their golden chords.  Back before anybody heard of T&J.
    He opened his eyes again, felt his heart pumping in time to the music, and felt peace radiating out from him.  He placed his hands back on the stick and throttle, breathed deeply, and scanned the displays.  One showed a squadron of Hellcats leaving Enterprise , shooting out between Jack and Cat’s squadrons on fusion-blue flames.  Another showed the incoming wave of missiles.  The frigates and destroyers on the edges of the fleet opened fire on another.
    Missiles, lasers, and gravitic cannons fired and there were so many missiles in the attack that they couldn’t dodge.  Missiles died by the hundreds but kept coming.  For a moment Jack was watching the Shang strike on Yosemite Station again, the day his world ended.  He watched Yosemite fall, ravaging the western United States, and he watched his father die.  He stopped, the past and present colliding so completely he couldn’t find his way out.
    “Jack.”
    The one word snapped his eyes back into focus on Betty.  She smiled her eyes said she knew.  She understood.  And she would always be here to help.  He held onto that knowledge as the music of T&J filled his ears and mind.  They sang of roaring thunder, crashing lightning, and the end of innocence.  The soundtrack of his life and a cybernetic partner that knew him good enough to make certain it played just right lifted him back up onto solid mental footing.  The missiles came and he flexed his fingers, knowing in his bones that it was time.  “Yippie ki-yay,” he said in a voice that was far too shaky for his wishes.
    If the cybers heard the quaver they ignored it, and the seventy-two Avengers of Jack’s little half-squadron opened fire with every weapon at their disposal.  Missile pods ripple-fired scores of point defense warheads into space, laser turrets pulsed into the teeth of the enemy attack wave, and gravitic cannons stabbed deep into it.  Dreadnoughts, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, fighters, and even carriers added their own fire to the point defense grid and he sucked in a deep breath.
    It was an amazing sight.
    Three hundred warships and the better part of a thousand fighters faced the missile swarm, filling space so completely that outgoing missiles exploded from friendly fire.  Normally invisible lasers stabbed through the gases of destroyed or expended missiles, fully visible to human eyes.  The roiling wavefront of death filled the sky with light and hundreds of Shang missiles hit the grid.
    “Take that,” Jack snarled as the combined point defense grid of the greatest Alliance fleet ever assembled stopped the Shang missile strike cold.  There would be no repeat of Yosemite today.

They say the best way to fight is to help someone walk into a trap you set for them.  Then you can defeat them on your own timetable.  Me, I’ve never liked other people’s timetables.  I plan to live forever, so I make it my business to mess with any plans that might go against it.  I guess you could say that I’m just not a very obliging trappee.  I will always fight to break out of your trap.  That is my promise.
     
     

Durango
     
    The sky was afire with the blaze of dying missiles.  They died in their