War of Alien Aggression 3 Lancer Read Free Page B

from four sides.
    "Good screen! Good screen!" The gunners shouted on comms. The fire didn't pause for a full five seconds.
    "They're changing vector!" He couldn't see anything or do anything from where he was but wait to get dusted and it was killing him.
    "Nine high! Nine high!"
    He shouted, "What the hell is happening out there?"
    Burn glanced at the portholes. Blossoming detonations and stars spun past. "They're trying to throw up a wall of range-det shells to keep the Squidies' fighters out past effective range – far enough away that we've got a chance to dodge their fire."
    "Topside, look sharp!"
    "Throw up the wall at 2 o'clock!"
    "They're breaking!"
    "Coming back around... rolling in from 4 o'clock low!"
    "Roll and screen. Bingo. Bingo." The gunnery module rotated fast around him as the pilot delivered port and starboard thrust from the nacelles in roaring opposition. If he hadn't been holding on to Marchett and Burn then he'd have spun over all the way like Hortez.
    Otto Hortez lost his grip on Cleeg and spun off-axis, smashing the side of his helmet against the loader for the port-side turret. Cleeg shouted, "Grab him!" Hortez had already gone limp.
    The red bandits came from 3 o'clock. The junks' turrets made a wall of flame in the vacuum like Burn said – a solid cloud of range-detonating shells blooming and fading and blooming again so fast it made a sustained curtain of hyper-velocity flak.
    There were gaps in the fiery screen. Through one, he saw an alien fighter bearing down on them. It was the same, deep red, spiked and pointed hulls that he saw over Bailey Prison, but he could see weird alien markings on the side that looked hand-painted. His eye fell into the single, wide-aperture muzzle of the alien fighter's single gun in the same tenth of a second that it reached out for them with a stabbing stream that slashed across the black and left a glowing scar on his retina.
    Kiwi spun and inverted. and he lost sight of the red bandit, but a half second later, the gunnery module got slammed from the side with fire. The outer hull must have been ripped open somewhere because he heard pieces of it ricochet off the inner hull.
    He was pretty sure the junks' wall-of-fire tactic wasn't worth a damn against the alien fighters and the pissed-off look on Burn's face seemed to confirm it until her eyes suddenly brightened. Whatever private channel she was on, Colt couldn't hear what she said next, but he read her lips. She said, "What the fuck took you so long?"
    The gunners all cheered on Kiwi's internal comms. Flashes of blue exhaust from dozens of fast-moving craft streaked past on the starboard side just before everything to port got ripped with cannon fire. "It's Topper and Dig and a pack of sixty Dingoes," Burn said. She patched C-block into Lancer squadron comms. "Lancer 1-3, this is 1-2. It's nice of you to finally show up."
    "Well, we couldn't let the Squidies dust all our shiny, new nuggets on their first day of school. And the Dingoes needed something to chew on."
    Now that the junk's flight path had stabilized, Cleeg let go of Hortez and let him drift face down. Hortez came to just a couple of seconds later and started flailing his arms. The inside of his visor was all deep purple-red. All you could see was blood. He began screaming on local comms: "Aaaaaaaa...Oh, god! Oh god! There's blood everywhere. I'm gonna' die!"
    Kiwi's crew chief was on him right away. He pushed Hortez up against the bulkhead, but the panic wouldn't stop. "Help me hold him down!"
    "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Nobody knew why Hortez shouted that; he just did. "I'm sor-ry!"
    "Shut the hell up!"
    "Oh, god!" Hortez made noises like he was choking on blood, drowning in it. Cleeg and Biggs got hold of him. He couldn't see Hortez's face for all the blood on the inside of the visor. There was so much it made him think maybe a piece of the gunnery module's interior had been blown off in the attack and had hit Hortez like a piece of shrapnel or a