"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!"
"Red Flight, regroup on me." The voice of "Butterfly" Butterfield. "No
enemies within six klicks. Take five, then we’ll redeploy."
"Computer, throttle back and reform." Atsuko let go her joystick and
slumped in her seat. With a hands-on/hands-off configuration, the computer
took over whenever the pilot released the joystick. Handy if the pilot
became disabled, or dead. Grabbing the stick returned full flight
capability. The human pilot stole a minute to sip water from a hose. But
even resting, she watched the sky with one eye and read her cockpit and HUD
displays with the other.
The power plant hummed in overdrive to resupply the defenses, the starboard
engine lugging but within acceptable limits. Shield and Weapon Energy
Statuses glowed gold along three-quarters of the bar: a timer showed they’d
be fully charged in minutes. The blue concentric rings of shielding around
her ship looked solid as angel wings. Her armament was reassuring: twin
banks of six ML-16 ceramic-argon lasers; two GTW-41 gatling-gas Disruptor
cannons; and in her secondary payload, a big surprise for some big enemy:
six GTM-3 Tsunami intel-track bombs. "Antimatter that mattered," the
armorers joked.
LDF-E44, nicknamed CHERRY BLOSSOM, was an antique refitted GTF Hercules, a
two-man (one-woman) Heavy Assault Fighter-Bomber. At the ship’s heart sat
its weakest component, a skin sack of guts, blood, and bones that was
Atsuko "Rammer" Toranaga, female, Asian descent, shavetail second
lieutenant in the Laramis Defense Force. And while the ship was running at
ninety-percent capacity, its pilot thumped her forehead to stay awake,
feeling as if she’d been mauled by an ice-bear. Her eyes were grainy from
lack of sleep, her hands trembly from stimulants, her back and butt and
thighs achey from tension and exertion over too many twenty-hour days.
Even her ship felt heavy and slow, as if the bomb-bay were stuffed with
lead and pig iron.
