Acceleration welds my combat arm to the chair and squeezes air from my lungs. As we roll, my ribs creak and my shoulders try to dislocate. Everything around me is turning black and white. Only there is no around me, because all I can see is directly ahead.
A shrinking circle going fuzzy at the edges.
‘Seven g,’ says the gun. ‘Twenty-five seconds.’
Colonel Vijay is unconscious. Other than me, only Haze is awake, and he looks terrified. Turning to forward again almost breaks my neck.
‘Nine g,’ the gun tells me. ‘Thirty-two seconds.’
It hesitates.
‘Say it . . .’
‘Going to kill them,’ the SIG says.
‘No, they’ll pull through.’
‘Not those two,’ the gun says. ‘That lot.’
A screen flickers to show me Rachel, Shil, Emil, Neen and Franc . . . They are twisted into the bulkhead. Far from helping, the curve of the crewpit seems to be forcing them into a single mass. One of the straps holding their net has snapped, another cuts so deep into Rachel’s arm it is bruising already.
‘Thirteen g,’ says the gun. ‘Thirty-seven seconds.’
‘What’s the tolerance . . . ?’
‘For them?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘For this ship.’
The SIG feeds me a figure so high we will be slop in a bucket long before I can shake the engines off this thing. As always, the limits are our own.
‘They’re human,’ says the SIG.
‘So am I.’
It laughs, darkly. ‘You really believe that?’
I’d nod, but g-force glues my skull to the seat. So I grunt, ease back a little and roll a turn. We just miss a Z7x fighter, which explodes as our rocket hits.
‘Five,’ says the SIG.
My gun is firing, the combat AI target-spots, and I fly. Should be Haze, but he’s away with who knows what. So far the combination works. Hekati is behind us. A bloody great ring hanging off the edge of a mined-out-
‘Concentrate,’ says my gun.
Another fighter explodes in front of us.
Out here, you don’t get sound; you don’t even get shock waves. You just get a burst of light and endless high-speed shrapnel. The trick is to outrun the shrapnel, or slide it off your force field like flat stones off water. Easier to describe than do.
My screen shows a fighter coming up behind. No way is it going to miss from this distance. As I roll the B79, the Silver Fist fighter fires, and the SIG burns each of its rockets in turn with a short pulse of cannon.
Rolling again, I loop my own path to take the Z7x from the rear. It goes up in a ball of flame, and enough shrapnel to make me twist viciously.
‘Sven,’ says the gun.
‘What?’
‘You’re killing the Aux.’
‘If I don’t do this,’ I say, ‘they’re going to be dead anyhow.’
‘Well,’ it says. ‘Perhaps they’d rather be killed by the enemy.’
‘How are they going to know?’ I ask, checking a screen. ‘They’re all unconscious anyway.’
The gun says nothing. Probably not a good sign.
Taking a slow curve, I see the edge of the asteroid belt.
It is that jumble of rocks, slashed like a broken line inside my screen. Should have thought of it before. 1500 klicks. We can do that.
‘Behind you,’ warns the SIG.
There are two of them, fighters in tight formation. And then, when I check again, I see it is three. One waits higher than the others, further back. That one intends to kill me. The others are just along for the hunt.
To unsettle me.
‘Incoming,’ the SIG says.
Yeah, I’ve seen them. The outriders sweep in behind me.
They intend to cross, which means they’re flying staggered. Although both open fire at the same time. Give me a knife, and I’ll take down anything. But this, slamming around inside some bloody machine, it’s not natural.
If I’m going to kill someone, I want to see their eyes.
Firing the retros makes Haze double over and lose the contents of his gut direct into his lap. Proves he’s still alive, at least. The SIG swears, but that’s only because it is flipping across the crewpit to hit a screen.
Somewhere in the middle of that, the SIG thinks cannon, and reduces both fighters to shards of metals, exploding gas and a flash of blinding light. ‘Ungrateful bastard,’ it snaps, when I remain silent.
But I’m too focused to answer.
Anyway, the third Z7x is beginning its run. The pilot is spooked, which makes him careless. This isn’t what he expects. Coming out like that in a group of three, only to be alone. Now, me . . .
I was alone to start with.
And here he is, chasing an enemy towards the edge of the asteroid belt. An enemy who’s just killed both his companions. It is not a big jump to deciding he’s next.
The fighter comes in fast, and I loop, with darkness eating at the edges of my vision until the world becomes a tiny circle of straight ahead. What I need is to get behind the enemy pilot and let the SIG do its thing.
How hard can that be?
As the Silver Fist opens fire, I pull up and it flicks below me. Looping takes all of my concentration, and as we level out again the SIG starts firing. You can see pulse cannon in space. It burns green. Don’t ask me why.
This guy is good. He twists away, and I follow. As he jerks up, I begin to follow him into a loop and suddenly he isn’t there, because he’s out of the loop and back on his original heading. Any moment now, he’ll do a second twist and roll himself behind me.
‘Wait,’ I tell the SIG.
Slipping sideways, I flip the B79 and fire boosters. The kick nails me to the chair and turns my vision to a tiny island of light surrounded by waves of blackness. As we level out, the SIG sights.
Looks like a clear shot to me.
‘Targeted,’ the SIG says.
‘Take it.’
Warnings obviously fire inside the fighter, because the pilot weaves from side to side and then rolls into a dive. There is no gravity out here, but that dive instinct still kicks in.
As we go for a kill, the pilot kicks in extra boosters.
Heat flares from his afterburner. And the fighter explodes into a weirdly flattened ball of flame and razor-sharp fragments. Only the shrapnel’s all heading in our direction. On the far side of where the fighter was, lights spark in their millions.
‘Pull up,’ shouts the gun.
At this level of g-force, that is easier to say than do. Executing a tight turn, I roll the B79 into the early stages of a loop and begin to climb.
‘Tighter.’
Bastard SIG.
Somewhere down the line, I black out.
Doesn’t matter, the combat AI keeps me on track, and I’m awake before it can turn one loop into two, or do something stupid like go take a closer look at all those little explosions.
‘What the fuck happened?’
An area of blank space hangs between us and Victory First, with Hekati looking vast behind that. There isn’t a Z7x to be seen.
‘All gone,’ says the SIG.
‘Fuck, how many?’
‘Twenty-three.’
We killed twenty-three fighters . . . ?
‘Fish in a barrel,’ says the SIG, sounding disgusted.
‘Them?’
The gun snorts. ‘Us,’ it says, and tells me why.
We didn’t kill that fighter. It crashed into the inside edge of a force field Victory First threw up the moment this battle began. If the field can destroy their fighter, it can destroy us.
And I have problems that are more pressing. We are almost out of fuel, our oxygen’s nearly gone, and we’re using what is left faster than the converters can replace. Eight people in a B79 bomber designed for three is a shit idea. Even if it was mine.
Also, we’re suffering.
My sight is blurred and my throat sour from the kyp. Haze is sticky with his own vomit, and what didn’t glue itself to the walls or the rest of us now hangs in the air, tiny spit balls of half-digested supper.
As for the others . . .
Colonel Vijay is unconscious. But at least he’s upright and safe in a chair. Looking at him reminds me of a very young General Jaxx, which is weird enough to make me decide to think about something else.
It is the rest who need help.
Shil’s chest rises and falls as she struggles for breath. A shoulder tab on her uniform reads orange. She has taken damage, but it’s not yet fatal. At least, not if we can get help and that’s one hell of a-
‘Sven,’ snaps the gun.
‘What? ‘
‘You might want to pay attention.’