“JEEEEEEEEEEESUUUUUUUUUS!” Phoebe yelled, teeth bared, gloved hand jamming the throttle to max. Yanking her rig away from the rocket in a single, sharp, outward spin, she felt the thing come up against the belly of her Seindrive, hit flat and skip across the fuselage, grinding for a split second along the debris shield with a crackle of sparks and green fire. She saw the streak of black scorch marks on the housing of the rocket as it burnt past, a visible testament to just how close it had come to turning her rig into composite confetti– and it was then, in that moment, that she realized just how lucky she’d been. The proximity triggers in the missile’s independent targeting AI should have detonated the warhead the instant it got within a few feet of her rig, ripping her Seindrive apart with a hail of supersonic shrapnel and heated force. Near miss or not, one thing was immediately and painfully clear– she should be dead.
“Dammit Mac!” She shouted. “Why are you playing with me? Be serious!”
“Why?” Came the amused response. “You wouldn’t want this whole thing to be over too quick, would ya? Besides, I like a little challenge. I figure with you flying that hunk of junk you call a rig, you can use all the handicaps can give ya.”
“Handicaps?” Phoebe sputtered. “Wait! What else did you disable!?”
Laughter crackled in her ear. “I guess you’ll just have to find out.”
“You’re crazy.” She shot back. “You know that, right?”
“I’m not the one flying the Seindrive.” He laughed.
Phoebe opened her mouth to respond, then immediately realized his game and closed it again. Her features set a little, hardened a fraction. Using the one advantage she knew she had over Mac, she jammed her rig’s throttle up to full and put a few hundred meters between them, just enough to give her room to breathe. If Mac wanted a challenge, she’d give him one, but she needed the space to set up the movements, the modifications. It was the kind of maneuver that no one saw coming if you pulled it off right, an old maneuver she’d come up with herself, even used once or twice in the simulators Earthside in order to take down pairs or triplets of Corolate fighters programmed to perform the kind of high-G maneuvers and strikes you never saw the real Cygnans trying to pull off in the field.
Fingers flew across the polyquid surface of the touchscreen interface that allowed her to interact directly with her rig’s AI. Remotely cross-circuiting the optical pathways on a pair of warheads and linking their targeting AIs, she set the twin rockets to receive guidance instructions directly from the PAT tagger her AI used to track and identify every target within a five hundred thousand kilometer radius in three dimensional space. Working quickly, she reprogrammed a handful of redirect commands in the subset firmware, then maxed the first rocket’s proximity detonator distance and punched the scatter yield of the warhead up to full. The effect would be just what she needed– two hundred meters from Mac’s rig, the first rocket would blast itself to bits, and programmed as it was for scatter, the fire and the smoke from its explosion would linger in the air for several seconds.
Just long enough for what she had in mind.
Throwing her rig wing over wing to the left in a move more flash than function, she spun back and dropped her throttle to nothing the instant she was nose to nose with the Slashdriver’s signature. Mac’s voice dropped into the static-laced silence, excited, eager.
“Here I come!”
In the distance, she caught sight of his rig almost immediately, dropping out of the sky like a scarlet stone before spinning once and sweeping back upward, correcting, always adjusting, shooting for the correct altitude. The tell-tale zephyrs of smoke and fire that came with the release of a pair of missiles blossomed on either side of his rig’s racks, and she knew that they’d be on her in an instant, but still she didn’t bother trying to hack into the archaic warheads– she knew their moves, knew their tolerances, their systems. She could outfly them easily, and it would give her the cover she needed to play her hand, the cards she’d so carefully stacked against the old Captain.
Mac reached her an instant before she had to yank the stick and drop her rig a quick twenty meters to keep his rockets from finding their mark. Burning overhead with his helium3 thrusters jammed up to max, the wake thrown off by his pass buffeted her rig and she went with it, cut her throttle again and let the turbulence toss her like a skiff on a stormy sea. Thirty, maybe forty meters behind her, Mac’s rockets reoriented themselves for another pass, fought to get a fresh lock on her as the Slashdriver passed on between them and into a climb.
She gunned the throttle immediately. A quick tap and switch filled a narrow cone of air behind her with isometric chaff, self-igniting nanite clusters armed with enough electronic countermeasures equipment to send the rockets chasing after false targets– a show for Mac that she knew he saw, flying above her inverted, waiting for her to fall into the trap he thought he’d set for her. It was clear what he was trying to do– the rockets were a simple diversion, something to distract her long enough for him to swoop in and hit her head-on with a cockpit full of flak. Half a century before and against the forces of the Centauri Syndicate, it had probably been deadly move, but against a modern Seindrive, the least she felt she could do was humor him a little, throw some chaff to make it look like she’d be easy prey.
The instant Mac nosed over into the descent to the killing shot, Phoebe threw her rig right, over the wing and into inverted. S-Vectoring panels flexed deeper into Nth dimensional space, distorting the air and covering the flare of thrusters for a spit second as the pair of rockets she’d reconfigured ripped free and tore directly upward at the diving Slashdriver. Mac spun, twisted in an attempt to dodge, fired off a round of flak that detonated so close it caught his own rockets and rattled against her rig as she cut the throttle and fell away. Mac would have his hands full for a few seconds, and as her rockets climbed to meet him and he made to spin away, the first detonated in a cloud of haze and shrapnel to rival his own flak. For an instant, he was blind, and as the second rocket punched through the cloud of its brother’s detonation and shot toward the Slashdriver, she could almost see him fighting the controls in an attempt to throw off his own chaff and avoid the hunting warhead. Already she was gunning the throttle, spinning into a vicious high-G maneuver that put her solidly on Mac’s tail the instant she keyed the detonation of the second rocket, giving herself another moment of cover to close the distance and make herself unshakeable.
Crosshairs came together, meshed neon over the helium thrusters of Mac’s Slashdriver. A sadistic edge tightened into the corner of Phoebe’s lips, corrupted the trace of a smile creasing her features. White gloved fingers tightened against the stick, tensed across the smooth composite of the trigger. A reflexive movement of the thumb flicked open rockets, triggered homing software in eager, vicious AIs. In one squeeze, every system on her rig would come to violent life, would pour its payload into the sky and set a cloud of fire and computer-guided death on Mac’s Slashdriver, an almost biblical rain of destruction that would prove, without a doubt, that the Blasterchild was not a rig to be taken lightly.
“Goodbye, Mac.” She whispered, and an instant later the sky froze to a hanging mural of tainted blue, suddenly filled with fire, an unnatural electric blaze that crawled isometric into the depths of the heavens and ripped its way into her rig, consuming the Seindrive texture by texture in a fraction of a second. Reality lit up, and in one horrible, burning second, Phoebe felt her nerves catch fire, boiling through a cruel deconstruction of every atom in her body that reduced her to ash, a breath of broken, subatomic bonds and electric entropy. Her last thought before the darkness swallowed her and eviscerated her waking mind came on a wave of shattered sensation, lost in a meaningless, uncaring eternity.
Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...
