BtH45

==Chapter 45 - By the Horns==
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Havoc 214
Local Space, MacLeod’s Land
Taurian Concordat
November 17th, 3025
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Air Master (Senior Grade) Gregory Boyington was a hard man—one of the few Taurian pilots to have made Ace since the long-ago days of the Reunification War. But for the fifteen other pilots and scores of techs assigned to the Taurian Guard Air Wing, he was just the Old Man, the leader that had worked them long and hard to hone their skills and have a chance—just a chance—to live through the furball and come home alive afterwards. He almost never smiled, was always stoic and sober and somber. Today, however, today, he had a grin on his scarred face as he watched the Outworlders tear apart McCarron’s lead fighters like the wrath of an unholy God.
“Hell’s Heart,” he broadcast as he altered vector slightly. “Ignore the gnats—we want those eggs. Division Two take Overlord-Bravo; Three gets Overlord-Charlie; Four provide top cover. One follows me into the fire at Overlord-Alpha. Arm munitions,” he ordered as he triggered the electronic arming circuits . . . and he cursed as the single Alamo missile that he carried ignited its booster stage and tore away from the heavy fighter.
“DO NOT ARM!” he bellowed, even as he saw another two of the nuclear-tipped missiles streak away with no target lock. DAMN this new fire control system, he thought. “How many did we lose?”
“Four, Pappy,” replied his wingman, “all from Divisions One and Two.”
“Damn all engineers who want to fix what ain’t broken!” he cursed. “Divisions Three and Four—manually arm Alamos! Four take Overlord-Bravo; One will provide top cover for your run; Two covers Three—understood?”
Double-clicks on the radio showed that his kids did understand, and Gregory bit his lip in frustration. “Break in attack run vector on my mark . . .,” he ordered and then paused as the watched the numbers and arrows in his HUD that showed vectors and speeds, “MARK!” he snarled as he banked the heavy fighter towards Overlord-Bravo.
Defensive fire blossomed from the impressive DropShip, but Gregory weaved his Havoc right and left, up and down—and his own missile launchers and lasers spat return fire.
“I’m hit, I’m hit, I’m hit!” shouted a voice over the radio, and Gregory felt his heart harden a bit more as one of his pilots vanished in the glare of an explosion.
“Ghostriders, we need some cover!” he yelled out.
“Roger that, Hell’s Heart—our dance card is full at this moment, I regret to say. We should have top cover in . . . thirty seconds.”
Thirty seconds . . . it sounded like such a short time, but in combat it was an eternity. “Understood—Hell’s Heart . . . stay on target.”
“Hostiles on our six, Pappy,” his wingman said softly.
“I see them—shield Division Four,” he ordered—and with that command, Gregory and his wingman cut their thrust and slid between the Taurian fighters carrying the heavy missiles and the incoming bandits.
Large Laser and Autocannon fire streaked out towards the Taurian fighters, but then the incoming Reivers staggered under a hail of missile fire! Four Defiance gunboats streaked by, their sixty LRM tubes reloading as they swept across Gregory’s attack run.
“Hope that helps, Hell’s Heart,” sang out Air Master (SG) Paul Dixon aboard the lead Defiance.
“It did, now come back and do that again!” Gregory ordered.
“You always do want more, don’t you?”
“Damn straight,” the Taurian wing leader said with a straight face. “And right now, I want some EGGS PEOPLE!” he barked.
A second Havoc erupted in flame and fury, but six continued to bore in—finally entering the range of the Alamo anti-ship missiles . . . and their nuclear warheads. “FIRE!” yelled one of the Division Four officers and two heavy missiles streaked away, attempting to lock onto the erratically maneuvering Overlord.
One failed to achieve lock and it went wild before it self-destructed—the second, however, flew straight and true and the contact nuclear warhead detonated as the missile drove home. None of the crew or soldiers of the DropShip Vixen survived.
“PAPPY!” his wingman yelled as Gregory grinned at the expanding cloud of dust and debris that had once been a DropShip. Alarms began to blare as an enemy fighter swept out of the cloud and both lasers and missiles slammed home against Gregory’s Havoc—and that was the last sight that the veteran pilot ever saw.
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