The Black Gate (The Messenger #11) - J.N. Chaney Page 0,75

soundly kicked.

“Damn it. If we’d known about the importance of this place, we could have sent some forces here,” Leira snapped, as Dash took in the maelstrom of fire erupting around the most populous of the three terrestrial planets here—the one around and upon which most of the League’s military systems were based.

“Or at least sent a ship, so we had comms,” Benzel put in.

Dash could only nod. The League lacked comms that could contact a ship translating through unSpace, so Hydaspes and its defenders had no way of broadcasting anything to the relief force. They’d been forced to drop into the middle of a raging battle blind, with only moments to work out the tactical situation and respond accordingly.

Which they did. Benzel immediately began snapping out orders, reconfiguring the Cygnus Fleet to confront the particular threat facing them. “Benzel, we’ll use the mechs to buy you time,” Dash said, signaling the other mech pilots—all four of them, this time—to follow him in on a fast-attack trajectory. He accelerated the Archetype, aiming toward a pair of big Deeper ships that had just blasted a weapons platform apart so that he had a clear run at the planet.

“Leira, we’ll take the one on the left,” Dash said. “The rest of you, the one on—”

“Dash, we’ve got two more Deeper capital ships turning on the fleet,” Conover cut in. “You said you wanted to buy Benzel time to get sorted out—”

“Do it, go, all three of you,” Dash replied. “Eyes open, now. No mistakes.”

Dash watched the Pulsar, Talon, and Polaris peel away. He and Leira had powered up their weapons and watched as their firing solutions solidified.

“That’s better,” Dash said, as the confidence values rapidly rose. “Sentinel, it looks like those changes you made to the targeting scanners are doing their job.”

“I would remind you that they are tuned to Deeper ships specifically, in order to mitigate the effects of their stealth tech. If we want to engage a different target—”

“We need to switch back, yeah, got it. Right now, Deepers are all I want to shoot at—speaking of which—”

He loosed a barrage of missiles, Leira following a second later. The projectiles merged into a single salvo, each missile’s AI now part of a cooperative network. Dash fired and forgot, switching his focus to the dark-lance and nova-cannon. The two Deeper ships had been alerted to the threat and were starting to shoot back. Bio missiles and x-ray laser beams came streaming back at the mechs, along with a new threat, one they hadn’t encountered before: powerful rail guns.

One of the projectiles slammed into the Archetype’s shield. Thanks to the mech’s recent and unpleasant experience with the Golden depleted uranium rod launcher, Sentinel had made another revision to the Archetype. The mech’s shield had been modified to allow for more effective defense against physical projectiles, albeit at an increased cost in shield life. A rail gun projectile deflected off the shield with a dazzling flash, vast kinetic energy abruptly turned into heat and light. The Archetype staggered slightly as surplus energy propagated into it through its shield projectors.

“There goes a quarter of the shield,” Dash said. “Leira, time to start jinking. Conover, the rest of you, same thing. Sentinel, let Benzel know the Deepers have a new trick.”

Dash and Leira immediately began spinning and spiraling their mechs through an irregular scissors pattern. Sentinel and Tybalt injected some truly random maneuvers, since even the best human attempts at being wholly unpredictable inevitably fell short. People, it turned out, couldn’t be truly random—at least not while sober, but Dash didn’t really want to try fighting one of these battles after hoisting a few.

Or maybe he did, it might make them a little less stressful.

“Okay, we’ve got six Deeper capital ships in the system, in three pairs,” Benzel said. “Each seems to have three little consort ships tucked in close—escorts of some sort, I guess. Two of them are moving on the main planet and shipyards, two were going after a big orbital platform around the second planet. Wait, the second pair are coming back toward us now, but the final pair are starting to bombard that icy dwarf planet—what’s there, anyway?”

“Our weapons and science division,” Lomas snapped.

“Okay then. Red and blue squadrons, you take on the ones going after the shipyards. Just follow Dash and Leira in—”

“Benzel, wait,” Dash said, dodging another rail gun shot, then landing another one-two punch of nova-cannon and dark-lance. The missiles they’d fired, those that had survived the Deeper