Jack of Harts

The crosshairs flashed on his target. He pulled the trigger.

The solid slug blew clear through his target and deep into the stairs behind it. Bits of warbot sprayed all over the stairwell and stone splintered behind it.

“Good shot,” Jon said into the silence that followed.

“Thanks,” Jack said and moved to another firing position, keeping his eyes on the shattered drones all around them. And the unmoving warbot now lying against the bottom of the stairs. “Having fun?”

“Absolutely!” Jon said as they waited for the next attack. “Haven’t had this much fun since… well… since I was born.”

“Good to know,” Jack said and licked his lips. He’d seen warbots that looked just like that wandering around Juneau back in the day. Though Juneau hadn’t called them warbots. They’d had a much softer name for them. Something about border defense and customs if he remembered correctly. They didn’t have very intelligent AIs, but there was one thing he clearly remembered about them.

They always traveled in groups.

Jack let out a long breath. The warning in the back of his mind was still screaming. He shook his head. “Because all of this so far has just been the warm-up act. The real assault is coming.”

They didn’t have long to wait. It started with the hum of more flying drones. Then came the sound of metal feet echoing down the stairs. Too many. Far, far too many.

***

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Malcolm’s Blackhawk starfighter shuddered as decoys and jammers shot out to confuse the enemy missiles. His laser cannons pulsed as the fighter squadrons around him laid down their own line in space and countermissiles shot out to kill the missiles that fought through the electronic warfare. Normandy added her own fire to the defense, along with every surviving ship in the fleet. Lasers, missiles, and energy shields destroyed them by the scores, but the fleet’s point defenses had been too badly damaged to stop everything the Shang sent their way.

Malcolm held his hands on the controls as the surviving missiles came in for the kill. His left hand rested on the throttle controlling movement in every direction, his right hand holding the stick directing orientation. It was deceptively simple and complex at the same time, especially for someone who’d not played many fighter sims in his life. But training turned it into instinct. He no longer thought about moving.

Malcolm felt danger coming, and it was time to be elsewhere. He moved the throttle to the left without taking time to think about it. Slowing down to think about it could get a man killed, after all. The Blackhawk’s thrusters flared and the better part of a dozen fighters accelerated with him as the missiles entered their final attack run.

Several fighters moved between him and the missiles in the last instant, even as their final point defenses continued to fire fast enough he could see the heat radiating from them. One lost an engine and fell out of formation to a near miss that was still too close. Another came apart and her engines exploded out in every direction to a different missile. And a third fighter fired an entire stream of countermissiles at one missile before simply disappearing as it rammed another aimed directly at him.

The missiles kept coming.

***

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Jack placed both hands back on his flight controls and stared at the Shang ships in the distance. They were not going to enjoy what he was about to do to them, and he had a few, short words he could aim in their general direction. A pithy little phrase for saying “goodbye” he’d learned in the last few years of dealing with real military minds.

For certain definitions of that term.

“Alpha Mike Foxtrot,” Jack said and bared his teeth in an expression nobody would call a smile.

Then gravity twisted sharply to the side as Betty fired all three of their gravitic cannons. Each one emitted a “beam” of twisted gravity hundreds of gravities strong and mere centimeters across that would cross the space separating him from the Shang in just over half a second. The Avenger’s eight laser arrays fired in full pulse mode a split-second later, and Betty followed that with a salvo of micro missiles from their twin missile packs. Jasmine’s eleven Avengers filled space around them with more death and destruction and Jack felt the vibrations go through his starfighter as Newton’s third law of motion made its lessons clear.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The Shang were about to learn that lesson real good if Captain Jack of Hart Squadron had anything to say about it.

And then the Thunderbirds opened fire with dozens of capital-scale gravitic cannons that shook the very fabric of space around them. Powerful lasers and missiles thundered out in their wake and even their fighters joined in to lay down their own web of destruction.

***

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