War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer Read Free

fast he'd go if he ever got a chance like this and here he was, standing on the lunar surface in a fully charged exosuit with not a guard in sight. And like the rest of them, he couldn't move.
    Marchett's voice came over local suit comms. "What the hell are you all looking at? Ain't you seen enough of this rock?"
    Telly said, "Thinking of making a break for it?"
    "Yeah. Right," he said. "Where are we gonna go?"
    "We got enough battery charge on these suits to hoof it to the far side of the complex and jack an automated hauler. There's enough of us. We even got our own pilot."
    Jeana said, "Where's Colt gonna fly us to they can't find us? Don't be an idiot, Telly."
    "You want to run, you run," Colt said. "I'm going to the landing pads and I'm meeting Shafter and Burn for our our ride out of here."
    Marchett shoved him forward down the road. "We've got less than five minutes, so if you want a ride, then you better move."
    When C-block got there, the 44 stood on the gray, orgocrete slabs for only a few seconds before they spotted the formation flying towards them – three cold stars that silently zipped across the sky. From far out, they were just backlit specks, but when they got closer, he could make out how they were blocky and crude – the opposite of a fighter. You couldn't miss the four, outboard nacelles and the offset cockpit. These were Staas Company junks.
    They looked like they'd been cobbled out of spare parts. In a way, they were. They'd been the workhorses of the mining fleet before the war and their 50-meter-long, tensegrity frames were like rafts onto which everything had been mounted. It was all modular and swappable. Everything from the cockpit module on the starboard topside bow to the reactor module slung underneath could be removed from the frame and replaced. They used to mine the Belt and the Jupiter Trojans, but he could see these junks didn't have ore containers or drills anymore. Gunnery modules had replaced them and clusters of gape-mouthed cannon barrels surveyed the sky from turrets on all sides.
    They weren't pretty, but everyone knew the war caught the UN fleet with its pants down. If it wasn't for Staas Company and the newly militarized Privateers, then Earth wouldn't have had enough warships to last six months.
    The three junks banked and rolled in on a low approach. He heard some grumbles and nervous snickers on local comms from people who were out in the yards when the Squidies came and bombed them. The junks' flightpath looked a lot like the path of the Squidies' bombing run. Once you've been bombed, anything flying at you low looks like its about to drop something bad on your head.
    When the junks were almost over the pads, they rotated their outboard nacelles forward and fired them just long enough to bring themselves to an almost complete stop.
    C-Block stayed on the edge of the pads until the junks set down and the airlock doors opened on the forward gunnery modules of all three boats. Two figures in Staas exosuits and flight helmets stepped out of the first junk and into the raw sun. Shafter spoke over local comms: "Nice to see 44 of you made it. Where's J. Colt?" He raised his hand and felt the eyes on him. "You're in charge of your fellow nuggets. Split them up in three flights and get 'em on the junks. Anyone gets left behind, it's on your head."
    He boarded Kiwi with Marchett and Jeana and Hortez. Burn and Shafter got on board Kiwi , too, but instead of riding in the gunnery module with everyone else, Shafter went up a tube, presumably to the cockpit. The junks that came were configured to kill Squidies, not ferry personnel, so everyone else rode in the cramped gunnery modules with the crew chief and the backsides of the turrets and the centralized armored magazine that held all the shells and fed the guns. Kiwi's gunners stayed in their turrets, but with guns on four sides, there was less space in there than he thought. It was standing room only and he got pushed up near Kiwi's