OBT Forum

That was truly brilliant!

Those tricky Taurians!

Well, most of them anyway.  after something like this you WANT a few survivors to escape.  Battered, demoralized, and ragged survivors.  After all, you want the point to be made, and spread, that when you attack the Concordat, you bleed, and even if you somehow "win", you lose. 

You want the few survivors spreading horror stories far and wide.

They are being over confident. Nothing with the Taurians is what it seems. Smoke and Mirrors

Transgressor 311
Local Space, MacLeod’s Land
Taurian Concordat
November 17, 3025

Sarah looked down at her display as the range steadily dropped between her fighters and the oncoming Hellcats of Wave I—and she grinned.  The Taurians were idiots, she thought.  All bunched up in one compact formation . . . it was really amazing that they hadn’t had any in-flight brushes against one another flying that tightly.  Guess they learned their maneuvers from the Lyrans, because it looked like a flying wall of steel, she chuckled to herself.  And then she activated her radio transmitter.

“Boys, you are about to get your asses kicked,” she gloated.  “How about this . . . we make one pass and then you turn around and burn for home?  After all, we don’t want to cost Thomas too many more of his precious few aerospace fighters . . . you know that you don’t stand a chance against our birds.  We’re heavier and have a lot more combat time than you do—so do yourselves a favor and turn around before you get spanked.”

Several of Mac’s pilots laughed as they tightened their straps one last time and ejected empty drop-tanks once filled with fuel.  But rather than inspiring the red rage she had expected, only a confident laugh answered her—and it was not a Taurian accent.

“Now that would not be cricket, now would it, lass?”

“Outworlders,” Sarah hissed.

“Oh—she realizes now it is a trap,” the radio continued to broadcast.  “You see, the Bulls did want to just rush in all at once—but I talked them out of it.  Better that my boys and girls—the Ghostriders of the First Alliance Air Wing—cut a path through you for them.”

“Mac,” Sarah broadcast back to the command DropShip, “launch the reserve NOW.  I’m going to need them.”

“Quite right, little girl—you see, we Outworlders take our responsibilities extremely seriously . . . and when you attack our friends and allies, you also attack us.  Were you expecting, perhaps, that we would stand by and see the boys and girls we trained to fly go off and then drink a cocktail without a care in the world?  If so, you were quite wrong—and unless you break and run for your carriers, in a very short time, you will be very dead.  TALLEYHO!”

And with that, the tight ranks of the Alliance fighter squadron suddenly broke into ten pairs of wingmen—performing the high-G maneuver as flawlessly as only the elite demonstration pilots and combat veterans could.  And then the pairs broke apart and began to scissor towards the oncoming fighter’s led by Sarah—their noses spitting bolts of PPC fire.

“What the hell?” one of her pilots cried out as they realized that the Alliance pilots out-ranged them . . . because Hellcats did not carry PPCs.

“Oh . . . sorry about that old chaps, but did I neglect to mention that we replaced our Large Lasers with twin Peepers—along with a larger fuel tank and more armor?  Shame, I cannot think of why I did not remember to inform you of that.”  There was a pause.  “Oh, yes.  Now I remember—because we play this game to win.”

Ten of Sarah’s fighters staggered as each was the target of four individual PPCs—and while the Transgressors and Eagles had enough armor to stop Large Lasers from penetrating on the nose, no surface on the heavy fighters was thick enough to stop a PPC bolt!  Wings snapped off, fuel tanks and magazines detonated, and several of her fighters spun out of control.

“Break off!” she yelled into the microphone as she slammed her throttle to the firewall and banked away from the combat.  “Rendezvous with the second strike!”

And that slightly amused, crisply accented voice came over the radio one more time.  “Ghostriders—let us plough the road, to use a Taurian phrase that our allies—and students—will appreciate. Shall we start the stampede, gentlemen?”

Havoc 214
Local Space, MacLeod’s Land
Taurian Concordat
November 17, 3025

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 Wars.  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.

You broke into their home and you expect them to be oh go ahead rip off our stuff. Loony Cappies.