Read Independent Flight (Aquarius Ascendant) for Free Online

from her seat. “Chief Alyse, meet me in the aft crew room. Sub-lieutenant Yeboah, you have the stick.”
    Two separate “Aye-aye, Ma’am” came in prompt reply.
     
    Commander Jennifer “J.J.” Josephson watched the outbound traces of the corvettes and their bombers fuzz out while her fighters remained on CAP near the carrier.
    “ Think Baldwin’s gonna pull something sneaky, J.J.?” came the voice of her squadron exec, Victor Avalon.
    “ Baldwin’s a sneaky-ass bastard and he just got a new pilot who’s got a rep for sneakiness. I’d be shocked if our intrepid CAG didn’t.” She rolled and turned her fighter to its new course, spreading the tac net outward. “If he’s going to be sneaky, we should encourage that sneakiness–right until we cut his legs out from under him. CAG owes me a beer, and I’m thirsty.” Josephson’s grin looked like it would be at home on a shark’s face.
    She pulled her flight onto a new vector and slid away from the rest of her squadron. “Listen up, people. Baldwin’s out there and we all know he’s the second best pilot on this tub, though we might disagree on who ‘best’ is. His newbie’s going to want to make fools out of us. We don’t want to let her. So let’s keep up our watch and our professionalism, and show both of ‘em that there’s more to a strike than getting the ordnance off.”
    Time ticked by while Josephson ’s CAP package wheeled about the carrier in predetermined patterns. Josephson was annoyed and bored, but it had taken an hour to go out and it would take at least a half to come back in. Counting burn time for deception maneuvers, it could be anywhere from two to six hours before she saw Blue Force again. Red Force in a game like this was being trained just as surely as was Blue. “Ma’am, sensor returns are inconclusive, but it looks like we’ve got about a third of the expected strike package inbound hot.” One of the pilots on the furthest forward fringe of the starboard side CAP transmitted his sensor data back to Josephson’s command bird.
    “ Visual confirmation? A straightforward trap lure like that isn’t Baldwin’s style, and I’m positive it’s not Gray’s, either.”
    “ Negative, Ma’am–but drive signatures are consistent with three corvettes and six fighters.”‘
    “ Acknowledged, six-twelve. What in the blue bloody hell is Baldwin up to?” Josephson clicked through her available fighters, “Hatters, shift to oh-two and check those contacts. I want to make sure that what we see is what we get.”
    A hundred thousand kilometers aft, ghosting along the edge of the spacetime distortion fringe of Avenger ’s drives, the ships Veronica had picked as her main strike package carefully positioned themselves to pounce.
    “ Think she’s going to fall for it?” asked a bomber pilot whose name Veronica had yet to learn.
    “ I doubt it. I very much doubt it,” she replied. “Baldwin’s got too much of a rep as a trickster, and I came in with much the same rep. She’s expecting an unorthodox attack maneuver. On the other hand, she can’t just ignore an incoming strike on other vectors–my sims are showing she’ll have to divert at least a quarter of the Red Force flight wing to deal with it.”
    “ Attacking from zero-zero off a cap ship’s drive plume isn’t unorthodox–it’s more ‘suicidal.’ There’s no way she won’t see us coming.”
    Veronica grinned. “That will be taken care of in about ten seconds.”
    The second jaw of her trap closed exactly nine seconds later, as the second wave of fighters and drones came roaring in from seventy degrees off the carrier’s bow. Though they couldn’t see the attack through the drive field aft of the ship, the fighters and corvettes racing in forward were very impressively simulated by Captain Baldwin, three hand-picked assistants, and a full squadron’s worth of decoys. Which meant that Josephson should be taking the bait, and she’d very soon have too