Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 15
"They're not as powerful as the dash-fours, but they still use a skipper type slip-drive for the primary stages, and that won't work this close to the target, not to mention the usual issues of operating a slip-drive within an atmosphere."
"But they can do up to five skips," Jason insisted. "Can't you send them out and back so they have time to arm?"
"In theory…maybe. But what about—"
"Just start getting the targeting package ready," Jason said. "Let them pick their own targets, but put in constraints they can only hit the ships that are covering the spaceports."
"How does that help us? We're already—"
"Just do it! I don't have time to argue." Jason was gambling on the fact the ConFed fleet would display its normal hubris when coming in to subdue a planet like V'pal, and his advanced (and highly illegal) munitions would take them completely by surprise. He also wanted his choice of targets to confuse the hell out of them.
"How many dash-twos do you want to waste on this lunacy?" Kage asked as he prepped the targeting instructions that would be uploaded into the missiles before launch.
"Three," Jason said. "That'll leave us an additional two along with the XTX-4s in the bays."
"Targeting package uploaded, you can arm and launch from your panel…crazy bastard," Kage said.
"Standby." Jason selected the missiles that blinked green from the armament panel and opened the forward weapons bay doors in the belly. He pulled up into a shallow climb, rolled one hundred and eight degrees to starboard, and held the trigger down as the ejectors spit all three missiles off the rails. He continued his roll until he was knife-edge relative to the ground and yanked the stick back, slamming the throttle forward. The Phoenix bellowed as her engines flared and shoved the gunship away as the missiles' repulsor first stage kicked in, and they rose shakily into the sky.
"Slick," Kage said admiringly.
The XTX line of anti-ship missiles was unfathomably expensive, highly illegal, and no longer produced after a treaty outlawed that style of missile. They were built to be launched in the void of space, and he hadn't been entirely sure the repulsor-drives that were meant to just get them clear of the launching ship would be able to propel them within a planet's atmosphere. He'd used the Phoenix's arcing, inverted flight to give them a little inertia as they came off the rails, and then got clear as fast as he could in case they became unstable or simply fell from the sky.
"You're clear, throttle back. First stage slip-drives should be going on in—whoa!"
"I…didn't expect that," Jason admitted as he watched on the display. When the small slip-drives engaged, the fields had stabilized close to the surface and had scooped out sizable chunks of the ground. He assumed the missiles had just taken the dirt with them, trailing behind in the slip-space fields, but watching in real-time, it looked like it just vanished. "Is that going to cause any problems when they stop and come back?"
"How the hell would I know?" Kage said. "You're the only one stupid enough to arm and launch anti-ship missiles while flying so close to the surface of a planet. You might want to make a note, assuming we survive all this, that there are missiles specifically made to be fired from a planet up to orbit."
"Yeah, but if this works, think of all the money we saved not having to buy two types of expendable munitions," Jason said.
"It is probably a bad time to bring up that each of those XTX-2s cost over twenty million ConFed credits each," Lucky said from behind him.
"I stole them anyway." Jason waved him off. "Most I swiped from Crisstof's ships, the others I helped myself to from Mok's personal stash when we blew his house up."
"We've lost telemetry, but they should be on their way back by now," Kage said.
They waited another ninety seconds before the orbital com channels exploded with excited chatter. Kage tried to filter out useful intel, and the best they could make out was that two of the three missiles they'd fired had scored direct hit on ConFed warships. No word on the third missile, and that concerned Jason greatly. XTX missiles never failed, and he was afraid the damn thing might have hit a civilian freighter instead of a ConFed ship.
"Fighters are pulling back up into orbit," Kage said. "They're probably being ordered into defensive positions around the capital ships. If they didn't pick up the missiles' outbound flight, they probably think they were hit from someone who just arrived in the outer system."
"Full active sensors," Jason said. "I need to know what's happening up there. If they aren't redeploying their screen, we may have to resort to drastic action."
"What do you consider drastic if not just destroying two capital ships?!"
"Sensors. Now."
The holographic display populated with threats and non-combatants, the Phoenix's computer categorizing everything, as the active sensors swept the system. Jason could see the chaos he'd caused over the planet's largest starport near the equator, including the two light cruisers his missiles had hit, now adrift in orbit. He also saw where his third missile had gone: it had hit a patrol frigate that had been loitering out near the largest moon. The frigate was broadcasting emergency codes and was spiraling out of a stable orbit towards the moon's surface.
"There…there's our window," he pointed to a gap in the blockade that was left as two cruisers had moved down to try and cover the gaps left by the ships he'd hit.
"Grav-drive online," Kage said. "Ship is configured for exo-atmospheric flight. Hit it."
Jason flipped the switches on the mains back to 'STANDBY' and verified the grav-drive automatically stepped in as primary propulsion. Kage had already plotted their optimal exit vector and course to keep them out of range of ConFed guns as much as possible, so Jason angled the nose up and