"Clayton Emery - Descent FreeSpace - A Thousand Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

A THOUSAND YEARS
Descent: FreeSpace
by Clayton Emery

"Shivans! Class-II! Pair at nine o’clock!"

"Roger! I got the far one!"

Wrenching the joystick, stamping the right rudder, the pilot sideslipped her Hercules fighter
until it stood on its tail for a second, long enough for the screen’s green gunsight to center on
a Shivan fighter wicked as a silver knifeblade. Atsuko triggered her laser banks and saw
metal boil on the fighter’s belly. The enemy ship flipped into a wingover and dropped, but
she’d planned to overtake it with a barrelroll anyway. Yanking the stick to her gut tightened
her loop. Stars whirled by in a dizzy blur, then she released the joystick for just a second.
The fighter bobbed and waggled as the computer autolevelled, and the pilot found she’d
guessed right.
The escaping Shivan lay dead-on.

Atsuko triggered a second recessed button, and twin Disruptor cannons scorched black
space. The Shivan knife-ship shuddered, kicked as one or both engines stalled --

-- but the momentum of Atsuko’s barrelroll looped her far afield, so her quarry was lost to
sight. With freespace as a battlefield, it was almost impossible to stick with an enemy. The
wounded ship would implode, she guessed, but Shivan technology was a mystery. Still, she
was an ace a dozen times over, as was everyone in her squadron. They had to be to
survive.

"Computer, rejoin the wing." Atsuko released the joystick, jabbed her console to widen its
angle. No rest: a pair of top-heavy Shivan bombers soared down a 140 bearing. Her
wingman called a visual confirm and recommended a split. Seizing the joystick, Atsuko
barked, "Roger! I’ll dust your ass!"
There.
Spiralling in came two spidery Shivan fighters that also split formation. Atsuko cut her
partner’s trail to attack the uppermost ship. Her wingman was a GTF Apollo with half its
paint scorched off. The Laramite pilot snaprolled to avoid an oncoming stream of purple
lightning, then leveled to unleash a sizzling MX-50 missile. The semi-smart bomb
backtracked the Shivan lightning stream, aiming infrared sensors at the hot gunport, but
another burst of lightning spiked the missile’s electronics so it curlicued out of sight. By then
the wingman had pounced on the spider-ship’s rear. The next MX-50 shot straight up an
exhaust pipe. The spider-ship’s back end blew out, then the entire ship ruptured in midair.
The golden flash didn’t even leave smoke.

Atsuko caught the picture on the fly, because the other spider-ship bored straight at her like
a bowling ball. Sniffing, she counter-matched its path, zooming toward a collision, then
goosed her rear vertical thrusters. Her ship tilted onto its nose. As the enemy rushed onto
her viewscreen, she led it for just a second, then triggered her disruptor cannons to blast the
cockpit where the shields were weakest. As the hatch disintegrated, she got the barest
glimpse of an angular alien body like a broken-fingered fist... then his ordnance erupted in
purple fury and the ship exploded in fragments. Atsuko hooted, "YES!"