THE GUARDSMAN: Book 2: Blood Debts – Chapters 52-53

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The Guardsman, Book 2: Blood Debts:

Chapter 52)

Samson knew this day was coming. He had not wanted it but since the troublemaker got her first taste of an interview without Citadel Public Relations people running interference and primping her image in real time Persephone was now ‘addicted’. So, he got to play his cat-and-mouse game.

Yesterday evening April’s cameraman received a small package with detailed instructions from a dead drop courier service on a timed delivery. The instructions set in motion the process of their arrival at this place today.

He had scanned April and Guillermo’s comms to save their information two days before. It had then been a simple matter of tracking down the devices and services those comms were tied to. Once the services were reviewed it did not take long to find both April’s and Guillermo’s home addresses. Most people bought something from one of those services or posted their information for friends. Inevitably some friend is careless with other people’s personal information and that trail could be used as a back door to the personal information of the person you were looking for. It hadn’t taken long on either of Samson’s comm scan victims.

If people cared, or better yet knew, the information a third party someone could shift from their lives just by a simple comm scan, they would not share their comms registration to someone else’s scan. But if everyone did the right thing life could end up being so boring. And men like Samson would be out of a job.

So, Samson played with his new comm for the third time that day making sure that his device was completely clean and void of any linking information to any part of his life. The one his paranoid dislike of technology chafed under, but Persephone required he purchase, because of her irritation at his free comm’s incessant advertisements. Persephone had left her ‘palace comm’, as she called it when she had departed the Citadel. Her ‘travel comm’ was synchronized with her palace comm’s contacts list, though it was never used for any of those contacts, it just served as a directory. Persephone’s judicious digital paranoia had set her to a scorched earth policy regarding applications on her travel comm. “Smart girl,” Samson marveled in the dank abandoned, and rundown entertainment complex. She had kept everything she needed, prepaid for two years of service, using anonymous terminals with anonymous cash cards, so no one could link the comm to her. Even more importantly than the financial footprint, both Samson and Persephone never allowed comms to transmit their voices and only used generic text messages to mask their identities from voice compilation intelligence gathering systems.

He leaned over the remains of some game system. It was one an alternate version of himself might once have enjoyed as a child. The way his life had progressed he never had the time, interest, and most importantly money to play games. However, the abandoned system was at this time the perfect height to prop his elbows while playing with his new digital comm, and the game top worked as a table to support two Gauss pistols. In the event that things dropped in the pot, the game system was thick enough that it could provide a degree of cover. For the time being it was most important as a location where he could see the door, monitor his alarms, and fade into the shadows behind him if someone unexpectedly arrived.

The key that Guillermo, the cameraman, had received along with his instructions in the package had belonged to a storage locker in a major transit terminal a few dozen kilometers from the Citadel. The passenger transit terminal served more than enough patrons that it was physically enormous, busy, and large enough that comings and goings among the lockers were not noticed. There were so many people in the passenger transit terminal that one or two more ‘tourists’ wandering around the labyrinth constantly looking at directions trying to find one locker in specific were routinely ignored.

The package’s promise to April and Guillermo, of a second ‘exclusive’ was enough to motivate both of them out of their typical assignments. Even if they were now network darlings, their scheduled events were still scheduled events and their prior engagements had to be attended before more prestigious assignments were parceled out by network managers. The two had to know they were onto something good when they woke up and their work was syndicated on a dozen other networks. They must have really changed things at the network and shuffled crews quickly because April and Guillermo had been on time for the early morning pickup at the passenger terminal locker.

The instructions in the package had been explicit and nonnegotiable about time and place. As far as Samson was concerned to hell with some Network schedule, all he cared about was security. If the reporters caught heat for April and Guillermo missing some pretty fluff piece, the replacement story about Persephone should shut up the managers. If not, Persephone had joked she would freelance the woman, and let her write her own ticket with the networks. Samson didn’t doubt Persephone would do just that if push came to shove with the network’s bosses.

Earlier in the day the pair of journalists had entered the transit terminal using the exact entrance Samson had specified. They followed the correct pattern around the terminal, according to the instructions they had received, apparently still in hand. Samson chuckled over his morning paper in the terminal when he saw that they were serious about following the directions in order to receive the promised interview. That was a very reassuring next step in their relationship, even if the two journalists didn’t know it yet.

They finally arrived at the locker, which was a straight shot from Samson’s perch on the upper-tier waiting lounge. The two opened the locker to find a second package exactly like the one the courier had delivered to Guillermo the evening before. Samson had spent most of the night shuttling all over the mega-city with clue packages, fretting over putting the right ones into the right lockers to prepare for this meeting.

The roundabout path the two had taken had two purposes. First, it revealed if they followed directions or not, which they did follow directions. Second, it was so that Samson could watch to see if anyone followed them in the same pattern through the milling crowd which would indicate a tail. The turns and twists to the route he had prescribed would have made it easy for him to see any familiar faces or tail’s sudden turns to keep following the journalists.

He had watched the pair open the envelope from the locker and read the contents. The envelope and the original list went into the locker as instructed. They kept the components and the key. They followed the instructions, closing the locker locking it, and walking away to their next stop.

Samson had taken several trams and private vehicle hops in random directions before his final leg to reach his present location. The trip had taken most of the morning. Since his travel methods had been slower than the reporter’s, he knew they wouldn’t be far behind him.

Samson had set up two sets of security buzzers at the entrances to the entertainment complex and tied them to his comm. The first set to perimeter entrances other than those intended for use by the reporters. These would let him know if a stranger stumbled in or if they were no longer following directions. The second set would flash in sequence from amber to green if their movement followed the intended but counterintuitive sequence. The instructions were to enter the building and travel to an entrance away from the most direct route. ‘Why walk from the door at your landing site past the entrance directly in front of you to circle around past two more entrances to reach the same destination?’ That little touch of paranoia should add a modest warning if the journalists were no longer following directions or if a stranger entered those doors by chance and subsequently got the pattern wrong.

The security program warning beacon flashed amber. This caused Samson to set the device on a flat surface and pick up a pistol in his left hand. Then the beacon flashed green several moments later. He flipped the comm face down again on the defunct game machine again, so the light disappeared after checking and before turning off the screen and slipping it into a pocket. He also slipped one of the pistols into the holster at his right hip. The area was now sterilized of his equipment. He slipped from gaming machine to gaming machine with his second pistol in hand, to a slightly better vantage point. The first position leaning over the game machine was better for dealing with the meeting’s trespassers, but it was not where he intended to meet Guillermo and April.

The frustrated female voice spoke volumes, “If this is another of those infernal envelopes sending us bouncing around this God-forsaken city, I’m going to scream.”

Her cameraman joked, “Don’t scream April, you will only disturb the roaches and hurt my ears. Besides, you said that the last three stops and you haven’t screamed yet.”

Samson quickly checked his comm’s security program status, in the shade of his pocket. None of the other sensors tripped after the correct two that had signaled the journalists’ arrival.

Relaxing slightly, Samson dropped the comm all the way back into his pocket while April mimicked a slow theatrical laugh. “I swear Guillermo, if this is a joke of yours and we both get fired for this you may not use me as a reference … ever.”

Samson had enough fun for the day, “You’re in the right place April.” He spoke from the shadows which startled both his prey causing them to turn, looking for the origin of the voice, in the echoing wreck of a commercial space.

Stepping into the rare ray of light that the pair were standing in at the center of the powerless digital playground, “I need your help picking up the sensors. Our ride should be here in about twenty minutes.”

April asked, “Ride?”

Guillermo asked, “Sensors?”

Samson’s wry smile was now easy to see as he stepped into the light too. “Yes. Every door and hallway in this section of the building has commercial ultraviolet light door chimes as sensors at the doors. I gutted the chimes and set them to wireless so I could monitor where visitors were arriving from. There is a reason you were sent in circles.” Samson pulled his comm and sent a prearranged text message to Persephone, it simply read: ‘received’. That message set Persephone in motion to come pick them up in a hired vehicle.

As he took them to show them what the sensors looked like, the cameraman asked, “Why not I.R.?”

Samson informed flatly, “Because that is what tactical teams use for their night and low light targeting systems, and if they have those with night vision gear then they would be able to see and avoid the trip lights reflected from the dust in the air and sneak up on me. That would be bad because they would be alerted to the security and have the drop on me.”

The man’s “Oh,” answered the unasked ‘Why bother’ question and ended the conversation at the same time. The three plucked the final set of sensors from wall and floor mounts and dropped them into Samson’s small travel bag.

Persephone’s signaled, ‘good’, meaning that she was in sight of the structure and there were no other vehicles in sight of the blighted area. She would arrive just after noon, exactly as planned.

As the three stepped into the newly afternoon sun to watch the hired air van slowing to their pad, Samson found his amusement difficult to contain.

Persephone had wanted to see the cargo operations at the freight terminal. Those operations were mirrored by the passenger transit terminal where the journalists had started their day with Samson. The industrial structure received tenders and light transports that were small enough to break the atmosphere with loads of cargo from short hops and the freight centers in orbit. The passenger side provided civilians the same lift to space with relatively comfortable seats but without the hassle of vacuum sucking the air out of their lungs.

Since seeing how the ships were made, at the shipyards, she had not stopped talking about wanting to ‘see what they did’. Samson suspected massive containerized drops and elevators that would send the cargo to warehouses and sub-terminals lower in the structure, but he had never seen the process either.

Persephone was behaving like a happy child exploring everything she could. Her infectious enthusiasm during their conversations managed to bite him too. Samson now had a fever to find out how the whole process worked too.

Climbing into the van began the final leg of their trip back to where they had started the day for April and Guillermo. Samson and Persephone were covered by their hoods. As instructed the journalists hadn’t spoken since entering the transport. No point in breaking security at this point.

The whole exercise that had consumed four hours of the morning would end less than a kilometer from where the whole journey started. April was going to be furious when they landed. Samson had to keep biting his lower lip to keep from chuckling as he thought about the frustrated statement she uttered when she entered the derelict entertainment space.

Chapter 53)

“Whatcha got there, Sir?”

Senior Force Recon Captain Alcander Chroynos looked up from his picture. The team was huddled in a craggy hole in the side of a mountain range, deep behind enemy lines, “Our last family picture.”

The mud-covered NCO asked, “Really? Which one are you?”

Eyeing the picture of his family he shared, “I’m here,” pointing to the young officer in the middle. “I was a newly minted junior Lieutenant when this was taken; I guess this picture is seven years old now. Phyllip ‘the younger’ here,” he tapped the picture of his older brother with his right ring finger, “That was before he signed into the damn Home Guard company. And these are my parents,” he rubbed his finger between Phyllip and Celine Chroynos. “This dork here is my kid brother. That sissy-pants doesn’t like getting dirty. So he became a Navy slug, sitting in climate-controlled couches all day eating ice cream with every meal. He has a Lancer now.”

Teasing the question arrived, “Who’s the hottie next to you?” Alcander felt his jaw clench in rage. “Is she your date or somethin’, Sir?”

Alcander wanted to punch the man’s teeth out the back of his head. He had to remind himself to keep his voice to a whisper in their forward position. No matter how well camouflaged and screened they were a fistfight would make too much noise to cover, “No you jerk, that’s my kid sister Rhea.”

The NCO backed off his tease, “Oh, sorry about that. I didn’t know it was her. I’ been out here ‘n there f’r the last seven years ‘r so, and we don’t get much more of the news than quick bites ‘n never any pictures to go with them either.”

Staring at his family, considering the holes there now, he quietly answered, “That’s alright, it’s an old picture. It was the last time we had the whole family together … ‘before’ that is.”

The older Noncommissioned Officer gently rested his hand on the shoulder of the senior Force Recon Captain sitting next to him. The minimal gesture was worth more than most people could reasonably understand. “Bad business all that, Sir.” He shook his head, “We heard about your brother and that mess that was way before your time with us though. We spent a while kickin’ around what we would’a done lookin’ for the bastards that dun’ it. Your brother, a whole squad of Guard troops, and all those college kids hit. What a lousy stinkin’ mess that was.”

Laconically Alcander droned, “Yup.”

The career soldier offered, “And the rest of it, well that pissed us all off somethin’ fierce.”

Alcander looked up from his picture for the first time in long minutes. He suddenly felt very old, “Bad business,” Alcander agreed.

The senior sergeant asked, “The little one with your mom is Persephone?”

Alcander let some bottled-up emotions ooze out, “Yeah, I think she had just turned five. The only way to get her to sit still was to pin her down in a bear hug, like Ma has her there, or run her ragged until she collapsed from exhaustion.”

The sergeant joked, “She’d make a good Recon Officer if we let chicks into the Infantry.”

Alcander groaned and snapped, “Are you out of your mind? You would hate her after a week. She would have you begging for a transfer to the Support Command Corporation just to get away from her. She’s only twelve now, but she runs circles around me academically, when I was that age. My mother has her in sports and dance classes all day after classes. She’s still a bundle of energy, bouncing off the walls. When she behaves, she’s just storing up energy to explode into some kind of trouble later. She’s been that way as long as I can remember.”

Alcander was one of those strange people who learned long ago that the feel of dirt wasn’t that bad if you spent enough time shaping it. Since the team was dug into the side of a steep forested hillside the dirt was nice and thick. The Terraforming Commission took years to develop ‘Green Worlds’ with their secret processes and accelerant programs. The trees grew in one year which would take up to a dozen years naturally. The forests churned the rocks and dirt and added to their density when they fell and decayed or burned. Alcander had his back pressed into the slope of rock which was padded with the topsoil that had been formed, thanks to the Terraforming Commission’s mystery process. His reclining position, with his feet out, sitting on his pack with his back supported by the firm dirt was a luxury that surpasses anything else he could think of now.

He and his team would be extremely comfortable until everything blew up in less than forty-eight standard hours. This world’s eighteen-hour day/night cycle meant that it would be relegated to a secondary world status. It would not be strip-mined but it would also never grow to be a capital world or regional trading center either. This world would grow into a nice little farming and light industry planet. It would probably top out with a maximum population of a few billion people. He had been on enough bizarre worlds with the Recon units over the last few years that this one’s little oddity wasn’t really all that interesting. In fact, it was a pretty plain place. His team maintained a two-hour watch cycle anyway so the nine-hour daylight period was unremarkable.

To fill the space and keep Alcander talking, the next question arrived easily, “So, your lil’ sis is a troublemaker, Sir?

Alcander flashed his rogue’s grin, “Not quite that bad, but she can be a handful. She’s not mean about it, but she likes getting her way and plays really hard to get it. When she sets her mind on something, she can be as stubborn as a mule. But she is also sharp and inquisitive, with a little of a jokester streak. She also has this really annoying habit of trying to help everyone all the time, no matter who they are or what they need. If my mother didn’t keep her on such a short leash, she’s the kind of kid who would bring home a new stray puppy every other week.”

The sergeant admitted, “She sounds like a pill, Sir.”

Alcander admitted in turn, “I guess she is. What about you? Do you have as interesting a family as mine?”

The old soldier pulled his silenced assault gauss across his chest and retorted, “Oh, hell no, Sir!” He checked the digital round count again, before popping the magazine and checking again. “My family’s boring. Parents are split up years back. I have a brother off somewhere, on some world or other, trying his next get-rich-quick scheme. I’m about due for a letter from him asking for more seed money. My sister’s the only one normal among us. She has a family and a little house on some farming planet somewhere. I have nothing in my family quite as interesting as you, Sir.”

Alcander looked over at his sleeping second and his three troops. The four were stacked almost on top of each other. In another forty minutes, they would swap off shift and he would catch a quick nap. His squad’s senior Noncommissioned Officer was a twenty-year veteran of the Recon forces. Since the life expectancy was only four years in Recon, he had beaten the odds many times over. Most of the guys who ‘bought it’ were very junior, so they skewed the averages. Once the veterans were established at about three years, they had pretty good survival rates.

Alcander pulled his weapon to his chest too and duplicated the round check performed by the old soldier. It was just something that they all did incessantly. “You know ‘interesting’ is never a good thing in our line of work.”

He picked his nose and flicked the chunk he found between his boots, “True, Sir.” He missed and grumbled while kicking the sticky mass off his right boot with the bottom of his left heel.

While Alcander was shaking his head suppressing a laugh, the sniper team spotter at the edge of their hide position called softly, “Targets approaching.”

Alcander crawled from his comfortable recline to the sniper team. Halfway to the snipers, at the lip of their position, he wondered how many nose rocks he had just crawled through.

When he cozied up to the second spotter scope to the right of the sniper, the team quickly relayed his eye to the target using their established target reference points, in the valley below. The targets weren’t hard to miss though. They were the only three-vehicle convoy in the valley. Since there were two military vehicles split between the lead and trail of a large comfortable executive ground vehicle with tinted windows, he was fairly sure they were a solid target. The seven-point white star on the driver’s side door and the small green and red flags flying from the front corner fenders cinched the decision in his mind. “Roger, that’s a good one. Hit the trail vehicle.”

The objection came as a gentle reminder, “Sir? Our orders are to locate the Commander’s vehicle.”

Alcander acknowledged, “I know. But look at that thing. It’s as clean as the day it was made while in a field environment too. They must clean it constantly. The trail vehicle is a good target. Besides the last time you were on escort duty didn’t you spend more time following around the ‘boss’ than cleaning your vehicle? And you stayed on duty for weeks. Our tracker will be discovered the next time the car is washed. Better to hit the escort.”

The sniper shifted targets with an exhale and the slightest shrug of his shoulders.

The spotter was only a second behind and the sniper adjusted quickly to his targeting cues. Both smoothly tracked the target to Alcander’s recommended target point. By the time the silenced rifle fired the seeking projectile the spotter had a solid lock on the lower side panel of the vehicle above the matted dirt but in the rooster tail of dust above the dried mud. The tracker corrected very slightly onto the spotter’s designated target, struck home precisely on target, and began to shift color instantly to match the vehicle pigment. The added dust from the trip would cover the tracker and make it look like just another speck of mud on the escort.

Alcander sighed, “Good shot gentlemen. Log the target and keep your eyes open for targets of opportunity. And make sure you have the right tracker number listed for that convoy.”

The spotter nodded once at the often-repeated reminder. He knew it was best to check and recheck because the one time you didn’t you would forget and screw up. He immediately opened his logbook and penciled in the target description, tracking number, and time of engagement while Alcander crawled back to his lazy recline.

Once Alcander had his assault gauss nestled in his lap again when he leaned back and heard, “Good idea shooting the escort. I thought you were shit nuts until you explained the target. It will be interesting to see if it works out well.”

Alcander reminded, “Well now we just get to sit here for the next few days and tag everything that looks interesting.”

Two days later Alcander had just drifted off to rest phase, during the deep night, when his section sergeant kicked the bottom of his boot, as he lay behind the left side spotter scope. “It’s starting, Sir.”

Alcander sat up, looked at his timepiece, and idly noticed that less than fifteen minutes had passed from the time he lay back in the hole for his rest period. He crawled forward, keeping his gauss across his arms and out of the dirt. He reached the edge of the hide position just as the meteoric lights fell from the sky. The rapid succession of flashes and secondary blasts over the ridge lines into the distance warmed his heart, as he felt the ground tremors pass through his body. The same rapid succession of the initial strikes added to the beating of his heart as he was gently pumped in time with the propagating waves of devastation. Alcander smiled at the destruction he had helped inflict.

His stalwart NCO cheered, “Warms the heart don’t it, Sir?”

Alcander admired the rising mushroom clouds climbing into the sky three ridge lines past their temporary home, as the ridge lines were backlit by the orange glow of massive ground fires. “Yes, it does. It’s nice to finally take it into those ‘Celestas League’ bastard’s sphere.”

The section Sergeant smiled into the sighting aperture of the scope while not looking away, and shared the math, “One hundred and ninety-three years. We spent turning those bastards around, pushing them back, consolidating and securing our border. And today, Sir, your grandpappy, rest his soul, gets to smile down from the great feasting hall in the sky because his grandson marked the headquarters targets for the bombardment force.”

Alcander agreed, “After two hundred years we are back to our original borders and finally turning all this around…” Three flashes of lightning stabbed into the sky from the next ridge line over, separated by a half second each. “Uh-oh, not good.” The sound of a giant hammer landing on plate steel echoed across the valley, making it painful to hear. “Not good at all!” Alcander was trying to crawl forward to see a better angle into the point of origin.

The spotter to the right calmly droned, “Got it.” As a second battery stabbed three bursts into the night sky followed by the hammer landing muzzle reports. “Gun emplacement, two seventy-two degrees, elevation … twenty-three hundred fifty meters, range … three point four kilometers.”

Alcander remembered his field glasses and pressed them to his eyes, as the rest of the squad, woken by the blast, began to prepare weapons and gear. Alcander recalled the range and quickly estimated the size of the anti-ship cannons in the hidden emplacement. “Hell, and fire, am I seeing this right by calling those two batteries, three each, forty-five-centimeter rail guns?”

His section sergeant and veteran spotter confirmed at the same time, “Looks like, Sir.”

After the thirty-second load time, the first battery fired again. Alcander rolled to his left side, forgetting his rifle as he pressed his back to the wall of their little cave and craned his neck around to see up into space, and the night sky beyond. He kept a steady count in his head. When he reached twenty-three seconds, he saw what he dreaded. A massive flash in the night sky high above, and after that much time could only mean something very large had just died. After a twenty-three second flight time at a fifty thousand meter per second muzzle velocity on those massive guns, that flash had to have been the invasion group’s Dreadnought that exploded. Nothing else would be visible from that range. Alcander droned as he slumped back into the dirt on his weapon, “‘Vigor’ just died.”

The inauspicious start to the campaign had already cost over ten thousand lives, the Navy’s flagship with the Commanding Admiral, plus the firepower from that four-kilometer-long Dreadnought. The chorus of curses and profanity didn’t derail Alcander’s thoughts. “What is the muzzle velocity of those tracker rounds?”

The sniper behind the rifle replied without thinking, “Five fifty meters per second, Sir.”

Alcander’s team sergeant crawled next to him on his left as his section sergeant spoke grimly, “Sir, I know what you’re thinking, these things haven’t got the range to track a target that far off. They only have a two-second flight time and we are shooting uphill, by five hundred meters from our hide, across the valley, and up to the emplacement. Not to mention crosswinds.”

Mind quickly running down a dozen paths and courses of action, Alcander calmly intoned, “I know. I want you to turn on our commo gear. We need to monitor the fleet and figure out who is left. The invasion should have started dropping troops already, so we are committed. We need to sort out who’s left in the fleet and report ‘that’.” Alcander pointed to the gun battery.

His team sergeant grumbled, “No, we don’t, Sir! Fleet can figure it out!”

Alcander contradicted, “No, they can’t. We are operating off stealth satellites to relay our data to the incoming ships and invasion force landing over the curve of the planet. Vigor was going to smash the command nodes and slingshot around the planet, to provide support for the invasion force. They were moving alone, dark, and from a slingshot position around the sun. No one knows they are dead yet, and they won’t suspect its loss until Vigor is overdue. The satellites won’t relay the targeting data unless that thing is tagged.” Alcander pointed angrily at the ship-killing battery.

His section sergeant had long ago learned how to shout in a whisper, “Well what the hell are we gonna do about it, Sir!”

He elbowed his team sergeant to his left, “We need comms with the fleet,” which set him crawling back into the hole to work on establishing communications with the rest of the fleet over the curve of the planet. “Next we need to figure out how to ‘lob’ one of those,” pointing to the Gauss sniper rifle loaded with targeting trackers, “uphill to hit something that is twice as far out of range as these things are designed to fly.”

Shaking his head, the section sergeant grumbled, “This is so stupid, quicker to run out there and plant the thing ourselves.”

Alcander warned, “You think they don’t have alerted sentries up and about now? What about automated defenses we didn’t know about? We didn’t even know about the infernal cannons and we were sitting right next to them! No one would have even thought to look for defenses at this point in the fight, they all have too many other things going on right now. They won’t think about them until more of our ships die.”

Grumbling, “Point, Sir … What to do about it?”

Alcander pulled out his overused and weathered notepad and the tiny nub of a pencil he kept in the spiral wrap at the top. He quickly drew a baseline and labeled it as the straight-line range, adding the five hundred meters of elevation to the gun emplacement at the end of the range. He penciled the diagonal estimated range of three thousand five hundred meters as the slope over the two lines. He grumbled to himself, “This is going to be rough.”

His section sergeant looked over his moving hand as he adjusted parts of his diagram and counted the elevation to make sure he had the scale correct. When he wasn’t happy, he redrew the elevation which changed the slope of his diagram. “How’s the wind?”

the spotter on the far side of the sniper replied, “Favorable Sir, it is coming up the valley and to the guns.”

Alcander bit his lips together between his teeth as he visualized the path of the slow, light-tracking round. He drew a graceful curved start that tapered off to a slow but increasingly steep decline after the top of the curve. With his pinched thumb and index finger while the pencil rested over his thumb, Alcander counted off the five hundred-meter increments between the point of origin shot and the targeted guns, down the valley and uphill.

His section sergeant doubted, “You’re out of your mind, Sir. This shot is easily four times the design spec on this tracking round.”

Alcander ignored his section sergeant as he finished counting the flight time for the round. They would need to wait until literally the last second to designate the target so the tracker could engage its tiny guidance system. He pushed his notepad across to his section sergeant, who looked at it and only shook his head, “This is so stupid.”

The sergeant pushed it past his eyes under the sniper’s nose, who actually placed the shoulder stock of the weapon on the ground and picked up the pad in both hands. He turned it sideways and held it level with his eyes from what would be his shooting position so that the final curve of the downward ballistic arc connected with the guns. He tilted the pad and bent the pages slightly, while his nose and eyes followed the imagined flight path from his rifle to the guns again and again, each time making slight adjustments on the held pad and the arc of his imagined shot.

The section sergeant grumbled again, “You can’t hit that.”

The garrison troublemaker and field soldier extraordinaire behind the sniper rifle quietly barked, “Fugg’id, Sar’ant … Sir, make sure they spell my name right in the fuggin’ books y’all write about this. This shit’ll make me famous.”

Disbelieving the Sergeant snapped, “Bullshit. I bet you ten-to-one you can’t hit those guns with your first shot.”

The sniper shrugged and mumbled, “Fine.” Looking over his section sergeant, “Sir, you heard that? He’s offering ten-to-one, I can’t hit it.”

Alcander agreed, “That he did, Jones.”

The sniper challenged, “Right. You heard the Sir, sar’ant, ten-to-one, I bet you my three day’s extra duty for that ‘Drunk in Formation’ you got me on before we left.”

The triumphant section sergeant had visions of Jones on an extra three days of duty cleaning and recovering everyone’s gear when they got back to the world. He snapped his agreement gleefully, “Oh, hell yes! I’ll take that action, Jones.” Three days for the offense plus an extra three for losing, for a total of six days of extra duty without pay.

Alcander looked at the exchange as his amusement grew, “Sir, get ready to count.” Jones should have been a team sergeant himself except for his chronic misbehavior in garrison. “Ser’ant, get ready to be my bitch.”

Before the section sergeant could rip his head off, Jones raised the rifle to his shoulder, pointed the weapon directly at the target, and traced his last imagined flight path, while feeling the steady wind. When he settled at an absurdly elevated angle, he exhaled half his breath, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. He carefully placed the weapon back into place while he slipped down the lip of their hole and rolled onto his back.

Alcander had almost forgotten to start counting when the silenced rifle puffed its shot into the open air. He managed to catch up counting out loud and reached eight seconds before Jones picked at his fingernail and said “Now.”

His spotter triggered the targeting designator in the middle of the closest three, now silent, guns. “Miss-check that, hit,” droned the spotter, “Wrong gun, but he got one.”

The section sergeant was on a roll at the prospect of losing Jones as his personal slave for three days in garrison. He cursed repeatedly under his breath, “Bullshit! Bullshit! No way in Hell! Bullshit!” When he snugged his eye to the scope’s sight he grumbled, “How in the Hell?”

Jones just picked his fingernails while he reclined happily, “Sir, you heard the bet, Ser’ant, y’ur my bitch now.”

His fierce whisper could probably be heard at the gun emplacement, “Bullshit Jones! Y’ur still doin’ your extra duty. That bet was for three days ‘more’ extra duty!”

Full of himself, Jones chirped, “That’s right Ser’ant. An’ no you get to do it right alongside me for those three days and twenty-seven more after that all by your lonesome.” Jones’ smug reply sent his section sergeant apoplectic and the rest of the section chuckling.

The double taps on his boot pulled Alcander out of the moment’s limbo between amusement and the pending hair-pulling frustration he was going to have to reconcile in the near future. When he looked back his team sergeant was holding the satellite commo microphone to him.

While Alcander keyed into the system his section sergeant and Jones were still arguing, the sergeant insistently calling the shot off target and Jones repeatedly spelling his name for the history books. When he keyed into the fleet and his brother answered Alcander knew they were in trouble.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Thanos Chroynos studied the tactical display in front of him and didn’t like what he saw. His Lancer frigate squadron was hard-pressed. Of the eight they had started with, only five were left. The Executive Officer was the first ship to explode in an unimpressive puff of vapor. Typically, the XO’s ship handled the non-fleet command communications, like Alcander’s call. But with the XO gone along with the two junior section leaders, including Thanos’ section leader, in the first minutes of the fight, the squadron XO duties fell to Thanos as the senior remaining wing ship commander.

Lancers were designed to kill ships only. They were engines and power plants strapped to a center-line gun, with a crew of nine sailors and one officer along for the ride. Since the gun they were riding was a thirty-five-centimeter battleship cannon, they could easily kill a cruiser from close range. The problem facing Thanos’ squadron commander was that all the heavy ships were tied up supporting the ground forces. Since Lancer frigates were incapable of killing anything but ships, he was sent to screen the formation of vulnerable transports from enemy raiders and fleets.

Vigor was reported destroyed moments before by the ground forces, by Alcander’s team Sergeant in fact. That meant that the scheduled draft of cruisers and destroyers that was supposed to provide relief for the tiny frigates would not be coming any time soon. At the same time, the enemy had dropped a task force into the system on a routine flight. The two cruisers and eight destroyers that had just arrived were more than enough to cripple the landing forces if they got through the protective screen line of the Lancer frigates. Three of them were already lost, when the traversing turrets of the newly arrived battle group fired first. They engaged faster than the Lancers, which needed to turn their hulls, slow their turn, and stabilize their center-line gun on target in order to engage. Lancers were great at dealing with targets in the front ten percent of their vision. Anything on the outsides meant the Lancer was likely a dead Lancer, which is exactly what happened.

Thanos demanded, “What do you want, big brother?”

Smug, Alcander teased, “A thank you maybe?”

Frustrated and stressed, Thanos snapped, “Screw yourself Alcander. We just lost the XO and both section leaders from our squadron of eight. Get to the point or get off the line.”

Alcander felt the cold chill of what his brother just told him sink into his bones. “Roger Lancer-Seven-Seven-Five, six macro-ship-kill gun emplacements marked. Beacon number,” while Alcander read the number from his notebook, Thanos was already pulling up the intelligence schematic for the planet to locate and highlight the beacon for the rest of the fleet.

Cold precision in his voice Thanos responded precisely, “Roger, target marked Romeo-One-Five-Six. Anything else Lancer-Seven-Seven-Five over.”

Alcander spoke calmly, “Negative Lancer-Five…” The blaring from a rescue beacon pierced the bridge of Thanos’ Lancer. He heard Alcander shout, “How in the hell did that thing come on! Shut it off before ….” The blaring rescue beacon, Alcander’s hand activating the microphone, the secure satellite communications equipment, and Alcander’s entire team were obliterated by a defensively loitering smart missile that was launched by the gun battery immediately after the initial Dreadnought attack. It was guided into the broadband electronic transmission from the rescue beacon that failed to register as ‘friendly’ to the enemy gun’s controller.

Thanos snapped, “Commo, get them back on the line now.” Thanos and his communications man both knew in their guts that they would not be able to contact the team or Alcander but they had to try.

The squadron commander’s voice interrupted the macabre effort to re-contact Alcander, “Squadron, disengage. Maximum burn until we are around the curve of the planet. Forty-five degree down angle towards the equator, skim atmo., get as close as you can without burning up.” The commander’s pause gave Thanos enough time to review and confirm his navigator’s course before they executed. “We need to break their line of sight, regroup, and counterattack with our guns on them. We are faster than they are, but we need to get the space between our hulls and theirs before we can pop up and reengage.”

As he was speaking, the Lancer Seven-Seven-Seven in the rear died when it was clipped by a glancing blow from behind on its right-side upper engine. Her nose was pushed down into a slightly denser atmosphere, which would ordinarily have meant nothing. Except this time, they were accelerating at maximum speed along the atmosphere’s edge. The Lancer’s long nose was abruptly buried in the collecting and heating atmospheric molecules. This coupled with the forward momentum and force of the accelerating engines caused the frigate to roll and rip apart in a fraction of a second. The burning streaks of fuel and ship etched into the sky around her fellows as gravity took hold of the larger components and pulled them to the planet.

The commander was sounding tired when he continued, “We will use standoff to pluck these guys out of the gene pool. We will reform on the far side of the planet. Avoid that gun emplacement that Recon marked. We will make a polar attack. Ground forces confirmed they had disrupted the enemy’s over-horizon communications network. Ours is still in place. We will predesignate targets and our attack sequence.

“We will reach vertical speed at max burn from the equator, parallel to the pole. We will form a two-section engagement square oriented with the flat face of the enemy; we will pre-lay our guns before we crest the curve of the planet. When we pop up over the northern planetary pole, we will let them eat our mac’-rounds.”

Thanos liked the plan. They would be out of the effective range of the enemy ships while they engaged from well within their own range. Even with the enemy accelerating at maximum speed, they would never catch the faster Lancers. Thanos always liked the idea of ‘flying sideways’ for an attack anyway. It was just so novel and bizarre that most non-Lancer captains could never wrap their heads around the concept. They typically flew straight and level through their turns so that the largest number of their guns could fire on their target. He also liked this plan because most captains were fundamentally landlocked in their thinking. With their over-the-horizon tracking disrupted, this would be a novel approach to attack instead of the standard, swing around the planet pointing bow to bow and bludgeoning each other into expanding clouds of vapor.

Even if the commander on the other side was experienced and flexible enough to predict the attack direction there were hundreds of degrees of sky along the planetary horizon he would need to account for in his defense. Thanos glanced at the enemy fleet display from the encompassing Chroynos stealth satellite network which showed them behaving as typical fleet jockeys. They had adjusted their course to intercept the Lancers as they emerged from the far side of the planetary horizon, had they continued on a straight-line attack like a typical fleet would have. The enemy commander apparently accepted the risk that the main Chroynos invasion fleet in the northern hemisphere would not peel off security from the transports to attack his flank as he moved to engage the Lancers in the southern hemisphere.

The squadron commander’s ridiculously steep dive set the enemy up for a flank and rear attack by the Lancers as they drastically altered direction and streaked over the northern hemisphere to attack their profiles. Thanos gently turned the three-dimensional image of the world they were attacking while the squadron commander began speaking again. “Lancers, we will reform on our northern turn, standard two-section box formation. Alpha section on me, Bravo section on Lancer-Seven-Seven-Five, Eight will form my wing, Six will form on five. Acknowledge in sequence.”

Thanos replied first, “Five, understood.”

“Six, Roger.”

“Eight, wilco.”

The squadron commander ordered, “Squadron, rally point sent, prepare for turn, thirty seconds, maximum burn.” Thanos plotted the course and with an affirmative nod from his pilot went back to the tactical display. He scrolled the projected course of the enemy fleet forward along their current trajectory in an orange cone. He pulled the squadron’s rally point and flight time into a blue line when the commander called again. “Prepare for turn in, three, two, one, mark.” The blast of the maneuvering engines tossed the ship into an acute angle, followed by the crushing power of the ship’s engines firing, pushing them to the northern pole of the planet.

The rally point corrected the squadron commander’s earlier mistake of calling for a vertical climb. They were now going to streak along the curve of this world and use it for cover for as long as possible before pouncing on the enemy formation’s rear.

Thanos kept the communications open to the whole ship so the crew knew what was going to happen. He preferred to have people around him who could make the right split-second decisions when he was busy. The crew could operate smoothly with little more than a nod or quick affirmative ping. They rarely required clarification and when they did the questions were actually helpful. Thanos wondered if other crews were this talented and the officers just ignored the sailors or if he was being sent the cream of the navy. He sent his tentative ‘inside out’ attack plan where the section heads would attack the high-value cruisers at the core of the enemy formation first and out to the destroyers, to his chief gunner.

Thanos checked the engine status and liked the positive output readings. He checked the navigation and saw his pilot had already begun to make the fractional adjustment that would position them quickly into formation, on the lower opposite corner of the attack box from the squadron commander.

The squadron commander called a second time, “Planar two-section attack formation. Outside-in attack targeting kill the destroyers first, they will cause us the most trouble. Attack from the ship’s position in the formation to the core of their formation, engage, scan for targets, and re-engage. We want to one-shot those destroyers so they can’t peel off and maneuver around our formation.”

Thanos wondered if the commander was more nervous than he was sounding. They were outmassed by over ten to one by the enemy formation. The commander was making sense. If the cruisers died first the foolish commander holding the maneuverable destroyers in tight formation for the Lancers to attack at range would survive. That would mean that the destroyers would be held in place around the cruisers for protection instead of forcing the Lancers to repeatedly turn their hulls and seek small targets over vast distances. The most dangerous thing that could happen now was for the destroyers to expand into a vastly spaced attack pattern and flank the Lancers. The squadron had already lost three of their ships when the enemy landed on the squadron’s flanks by accident. If the eight destroyers were allowed to run free each Lancer would be forced to traverse many degrees of sky in order to attack widely dispersed targets which would cripple their attack time.

Instead, by keeping the enemy commander and formation intact the squadron commander was allowing them to continue making their current mistake. Thanos smiled at Thomys Promethean’s often repeated mantra, ‘If the enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt him’.

While he was making a note in his ship’s log reminding himself to forward the engagement to the Empire’s VP along with his comments, his gunnery chief sent him a modified attack plan. He had been so busy daydreaming that he had failed to restart the attack plan with the new fire controls to kill the destroyers first. The plan was good. Thanos took note that there were even number tags on the likely targets as they would present themselves to the ship’s gun.

The first target was actually in the middle of the formation, just under where the commander’s wing Lancer should engage as a first target. The gunner was poaching. He wanted to get an early shot off, so he targeted the destroyer that his fellow gunner would not be able to hit while they were suffering their thirty-second reload time. Thanos chuckled as he compared the navigation plot to the horizon of the planet and realized that the gunner would have almost ten seconds to lay the shot and another five to engage. Since he would already have the finalized targeting from Alpha section, he could start laying the gun as soon as Alpha had targets in sight. He approved the plan, the faster they killed the enemy destroyers the better.

The squadron commander exhuded his calm into the net, “Squadron, prepare to finalize formation. Fifteen minutes until attack, my mark … Cut acceleration on my mark, three, two, one … mark.” The commander concluded unnecessarily, “Make final weapon checks, prepare for engagement. Lancer-One out.”

This was the worst part. All Thanos could do was sit comfortably, with nothing to do as the terminal velocity of the ships in formation streaked around the planet. It was nerve-wracking, with nothing to think about but the upcoming engagement and the possible mistakes he had made. The ships automatically make minuscule adjustments to speed the upper section fractionally faster around the planet so the formation could wheel on the enemy and present a uniform firing solution. The pilot, communications, and ship systems sailors all had plenty to do to keep them busy, from shuffling targeting data and confirming courses and systems. All Thanos could do was drum his fingers and watch the stars move, as the perspective visibly shifted from slingshotting around the planet.

They would crest the equator and intercept what would be the enemy formation’s right rear eighth. They had almost three minutes before the destroyers could effectively engage the squadron from the time the Lancers could start shooting. The Cruisers were another matter. Their larger guns could get lucky at the ninety-second mark.

The Lancers could fire three times each before the enemy was in range and could retaliate. But since they were shooting at tiny destroyers as targets, they would most likely miss half their shots. That meant that they would have between two and four destroyers left when the cruisers could start cutting into the squadron.

They were far too close to the planetary gravity well for their finely tuned jump drives to kick them into the faster-than-light movement to escape. If the squadron had to run they would be in the enemy flotilla’s engagement envelope for another two minutes to reach them, and another five minutes trying to dodge the rounds the survivors of the enemy flotilla would be firing into their engines as the remnants of the Lancer squadron dove for deep space.

Since closure engagement times were measured in fractions of a second those five minutes would be an eternity in hell. The squadron had to win or die against eight destroyers and two cruisers that out-massed the Lancers ten-to-one. If they tried to turn away to engage, they would only drift past the enemy while shooting and would make easy targets. They had to take them head-on, kill the enemy, and dive through the shattered formation if they wanted to survive.

Thanos shook his head and wondered how he had been so stupid to request a Lancer command. He knew the answer as soon as he asked; he wanted the ‘command’. But now he was seriously considering moving to battleships, or maybe even a nice executive officer position on a cruiser. While he was still shaking his head, “What would mother say…”

A voice responded, “She’d probably say you’re shit-nuts, Sir.” Thanos hadn’t realized he spoke out loud when he looked over to his right front at his pilot. The man’s fingers danced over his console making final adjustments, “Just like mine when I told her what we did.” He never looked up from his computations to see Thanos frowning at the back of his head. The movement to his front left was his communications shuffling targeting data to the guns and silently laughing while his fingers slipped left and right routing communications to his console also. Thanos wondered if his communications petty officer had the same conversation at some point with his family too.

When he looked down at the counter Alpha section was less than ten seconds from engaging the first of the destroyers. His own section would cross the horizon line only a few seconds after Alpha.

Thanos pulled a long breath followed by a longer calming exhale, at the base of his exhale his eyes closed briefly before reopening and looking at the tactical display. The display began to populate with hard data instantly as Alpha section analyzed and shared the enemy ship positions and projected courses with Bravo section. Targeting carrots flashed circles around the ships Alpha was engaging.

The gunnery chief pre-laid the ship and gun while the pilot made tiny course corrections around the gunner’s targeting solution. Their target was only exposed for half a second before the thirty-five-centimeter gun they were riding coughed and shook the whole ship. The engines were tuned to boost power output to ‘match’ the recoil from the weapon so that the ship didn’t drop speed when firing. The coordination from the engines to the gun was just as important as the pilot to the guns.

Lancer-Six fired only a few seconds after Lancer-Five. The squadron’s free shot at the enemy killed two destroyers as expected. The rolling fire stripped another four destroyers from the cruisers over the next sixty-plus seconds.

The wounded enemy flotilla fired wildly into the oncoming Lancers. Their smaller projectiles were too light to resist the very slight differential in the upper atmosphere. Over the tremendous ranges, they were shooting slightly high, as the bottoms of their rounds skipped off that fraction of extra molecules the curvature of the planet and atmosphere placed between the closing warships. They were not designed to fire through the atmosphere nor were they built to compensate for those modest variables. But the enemy gunners were correcting and adjusting their sights.

The commander called, “Shift fire. By sections outside-in. Alpha section engages small to large. Bravo section engage large to small. Lancer-One out.” Then Thanos’ fingers danced over the targets, he selected the trail cruiser since he was on the lower left of the formation. That cruiser was closest to his sector of fire. Before he could finish, a targeting carrot appeared over the cruiser. His gunnery chief had beaten him to the solution again. Thanos tapped it twice to approve the solution and felt the ship shudder between the rapid acceleration of the one-ton projectile down the gun tube and the explosive acceleration of the engines kicking the ship forward in a massive burst of power.

Some Lancer crew members he had met compared firing the main gun to riding a bull for three seconds as the ship rocked between the explosive engine force and the recoil of the gun in the middle jarring heads and stomachs first forward, then back as the engines overcompensated. Thanos was a city kid and had seen the sport on vid only but had studiously avoided strapping a pissed-off wild animal that large, or any animal for that matter, between his legs.

Thanos watched as his ship’s projectile smoothly cut into the cruiser just behind mid-ship. It was a fraction high on the hull. It didn’t really matter where it landed in that area. The one-ton projectile sliced through the seventeen-thousand-ton ship, in an eruption of flame and broken steel. Even if the instantaneous release of kinetic and thermal energy released in the blast hadn’t killed the command crew, the sudden exposure to a vacuum sucking them into space as the projectile ripped open the bridge at the heart of the ship would have killed them. If the crew was extremely disciplined and paranoid and were in suits, the tons of spall and white-hot metal created by the superheating of the hull and multiple decks would have killed them anyway as the ship died catastrophically.

Thanos looked up from the secondary explosion of the gutted cruiser’s reactor, which sent the largest remaining piece, a mere sliver of the nose of the ship, burning and spinning into the upper atmosphere, just in time to see his wing ship miss their target. Lancer-Six’s round passed amazingly under their target cruiser. “How in the hell did they miss that?” Thanos highlighted the ship for re-engagement, as one of the two enemy destroyers finally dissolved into flame.

Lancer-Six’s shot at the cruiser had clipped the bottom of the hull in the rear two-thirds of the ship, which kicked her up into a sickly bucking-rolling position. Thanos was pressing the button to ask where their brains were when the communications petty officer spoke, “Lancer-Six took a hit down their center line.” The man had been watching the friendly ships in the formation, not the enemy as was his job, so his report was the first Thanos saw that his wing ship had died. Thanos zoomed his tactical display out to see their own formation instead of focusing on the attack and confirmed that Lancer-Six was gone.

The thin Lancers were extremely difficult to hit head-on, the only front profile they carried was the dozen meters across the gun, the crew section that ran the length of the gun and provided access for maintenance, and the flaring engine and thruster assembly at the back of the ship. Most of the time if they were hit while attacking head-on the enemy would only take a chunk of the engine compartment and one of the thruster assemblies. From the side, they were long juicy targets with next to no armor. That was not the case with Lancer-Six, who were just unlucky.

Thanos reported the loss to the squadron commander who replied, “Understood, re-engage the enemy, kill that cruiser. I’ve got the last destroyer.”

Before Thanos could reply, Lancer-Eight took a hit low on their engines. The unbalanced thrust sent the commander’s wing ship nose down into the atmosphere where the ruptured hull cartwheeled into the atmosphere, spilling the burning crew and ship into a falling cloud of debris behind Thanos and the commander. The commander’s curt expletive told Thanos that he didn’t need to report that loss and that the commander had just watched his wing ship die.

In the thirty seconds it took Thanos to realize his wing ship had died and report to the commander, his ship’s main gun fired its second shot at the last enemy cruiser. Like their first, the second was a kill shot. Instead of ripping the enemy to shreds and breaking their keel, the second ship died in a silent but spectacular expanding rose of flame, when Lancer-Five’s round passed through the ship’s reactor and splashed the superheated plasma with ionized steel and hull, along with the kinetic energy the round carried into the thickest part of the enemy cruiser. As he marked the last destroyer with a carrot icon for engagement the squadron commander’s round passed through it at mid-ship and squished it in an unimpressive puff of gas and brief flame.

The relieved squadron commander’s voice set Thanos at ease, “Good shooting Five.” He hadn’t realized that they had actually won the engagement and survived. “Turn sunward along the planetary equator. We’ll run fast and hard around the planet to the fleet. We’ll drop acceleration when we are closer to linking up. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Thanos nodded to his pilot who started the lazy turn manually while he set the course more precisely into the navigation computer. “Roger Lancer-One. Forwarding the engagement data to the fleet, via the relay satellites.”

The squadron commander complimented with the acting promotion, “Thank you, XO. Good shooting.”

Thanos accepted, “Roger, you too Sir. I don’t think we could have gotten that destroyer before she killed the both of us.”

The commander took a few moments to laugh tiredly. “That’s why we took so long before we finally pulled the trigger on him. We’ll talk later, out.”

Thanos relaxed for the fifteen minutes it took the flight to loop around a quarter of the planet before the remnants of the Lancer squadron had to flip over and begin burning their engines to slow to a manageable speed for approaching the rest of the fleet and the landing craft.

While the two Lancers streaked over the planet’s equator both pilots initiated the reversal simultaneously and both ships moved as one and mirrored deceleration. As the squadron’s XO Thanos was privy to the communications routing to the commander and was pleased to see the fleet’s surviving Vice-Admiral commend the squadron commander for saving the transports and fleet. Thanos flicked the communication from his console into the crew consoles so they could have a small comfort. It would not compensate for watching sixty of their starting eighty squadron mates die in less than an hour but was appreciated and they had saved countless other lives on the troop ships. It was a hollow consolation to the squadron, and Thanos knew it.

As Thanos was exhaling a bone-tired exhale and rubbing his eyes his gunner shouted, “Contact! Transports and escorts!” He jerked to attention, whacking his knee on the console, before highlighting the newly sighted priority targets for Lancer-One and shoving his targeting solution to the commander.

The message was never received, the same instant he sent the message Lancer-One took an enemy round in the power plant and popped out of existence.

Thanos snapped, “Gunner! Fire as the target bears!” There was no need for confirmation; both the gunner and pilot were already busy as the ship rapidly turned to point out to space, and the approaching enemy long-haul commercial fertilizer and farming equipment convoy. The convoy’s escorts had massive plumes of flame highlighting the nearly blind Lancers as they burned to slow their forward momentum. The convoy had time to drop into real space, realize that things were ‘wrong’ at their destination, confirm the planet was being invaded, and engage the Lancers before either the commander or Thanos realized the enemy was there. The travel time of the convoy escort’s rounds was so great that Lancer-One was on a fatal collision course with an enemy round before Thanos’ gunner even called contact.

The enemy’s first shot had missed Lancer-Five. The spread of following rounds that the enemy escorts launched at the maneuvering Lancer was unobstructed by the atmosphere, surprise, or incoming Lancer squadron fire. The widely spaced destroyers escorting the commercial fertilizer and farming equipment convoy had already launched the round that ripped Lancer-Five into atoms. The enemy destroyers were in their deep space element, firing ‘down’ into the predictably turning Lancer.

Thanos and his crew never knew they were hit.

Thank You!

Thank you for reading this chapter!

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