War of Alien Aggression 5 Cozen's War by A.D. Bloom

 
    " Mr. Biko, do all of our fighter squadrons appear to be where they’re supposed to be?"  
    " At maximum acceleration, with no engagement delay, estimated time to strike range is 63 seconds. But they’ll take the shot further out. For bragging rights."  
    " Not much chance for evasive maneuvering at that rate of acceleration."  
    Biko said, " None, actually. But that’s what it’ll take to get there fast enough."  
    Once the alien ambassadorial ship had closed to within 10Ks of Arbitrage , both vessels turned and burned to halt their forward motion. Then, Arbitrage spun to turn her starboard side and her bay door away from the hellish low-end glow of Beta Draconis, placing that entire side of the ship in shadow.  
    "Matilda is opening the bay door," Cozen said. She launched in the longboat when the door was only open a fraction of its width. They saw it continue to cycle fully open as the pale blue flare of her longboat’s exhaust lit the starboard side of the ship before she radically changed vector and came on a slow, but direct course for the alien ambassadorial ship. All eyes were on her.  
    Cozen ground his next words out with the grit of his voice. "Give the order to the squadrons."
    *****
    The ninety-six F-151s and the Lancers’ six, hulking Sky Jack 223s blazed hell-bent, straight at their target, formed up in echelon. There was no way to pull off evasive maneuvers blasting themselves forward this hard, accelerating this fast. And Squidy was already on the way.
    The squadrons of alien interceptors that had formed up to match the Hardway Air Group’s fighter threat as best they could now hurtled up through the Squidy battle-lines and came screaming at them.
    Thirty-six, Pooch counted.
    "This is Lancer 1-1. We go right through this and we keep going, you understand me? There will not be a furball here." Lancer 1-1 got to give the final bingo...lucky mutherfucker. At T-minus three seconds to range, he gave the command, "Cut rear thrust and pivot on your thrusters to face them for the pass. Open fire at will. Do the dirty on my Bingo in 3…2…1…"
    After she rotated, she saw the lead elements of the Squidy formation coming right at her. All three of them flew with small-bore particle streams slicing in two-second bursts, gunning for her by slashing them across her path. She couldn’t change direction now. The only thing she could do now is what all of them did. They screamed rage and hate and threw it at the enemy with their cannon shells. High-explosives blossomed and sabot sparked and burrowed into the alien fighters as the alien guns cut across the Privateer formation.
    The Squidies expected them to flinch, to pull away and evade, but they couldn’t, not even if they’d wanted to. Their inertial negation systems weren’t powerful enough to allow maneuvers at that speed without the pilots getting turned to a mass of crushed cells and bone chips and fluid by the inertial gees.
    With reactor detonations flashing and all their guns firing, the two formations met in a conflagration of expanding fireballs whose edges grew and met and overlapped until a bright and brief, burning nebula had formed that obscured all vision, LiDAR and radar. Pooch flew blind and screaming with hellfire clinging to the vertical cockpit canopy of her Bitzer like she was in a glass coffin and someone had set the lid afire.
    Forty-one Privateer fighters emerged from that cloud. Jarvis. Lancer 1-5 and 1-6. Dodge. Lancer 1-1. She didn't want to look and see who else was still alive, but her eye picked them out and her helmet flashed the names in her face. So many names were missing.
    Almost as a single fighter, the remaining interceptors rotated to point their noses back on target and slammed themselves again with thrust and didn't look back.
    The smaller, faster-targeting defensive guns of the enemy line ships opened up and took their toll. The Privateer pilots flew through the streams with grit teeth and set jaws until