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Authors: A.D. Bloom
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Alien beams stabbed and waved from a dozen guns on that side of the enemy hull and Jordo saw them all – completely . That is to say, in an instant, Jordo's eye and mind and gut embraced them entirely and somehow took in not only the positions of all the alien batteries and where they currently pointed, but everything about them including the rate of fire, the speed of aim, and even the observed, individual peculiarities of each alien gun crew. He saw not only where they fired now , at this instant, but where they would fire in the next millisecond and the one after that and the one after that.
Jordo saw the golden thread . All the Lancers had different names for it. Gush called it 'the path' and Dirty said it was like a song she instantly knew, but Jordo saw a golden filament stitched through the furball, drawing the perfect path that evaded enemy fire and led him to kill after kill after kill. Now, it drew a perfect line through the waving, alien guns, down through the crisscrossing spider's web of particle beams groping the vacuum to find him.
When he was close enough to reach out and touch the alien gun towers, Jordo spiraled down around a single beam that spat determined and spiteful bursts as if the alien gunners who fired it knew he was coming for them and now, it was personal. Jordo's six autocannon rattled the frame of his fighter, and as he fired, the space to port and starboard and above and below him filled with shells, too. A furious deluge rained down from all the Lancers' guns.
Jordo didn't stop firing as he circled and descended, rolling down, around the beam until the flashes and the secondary detonations at the base of his fire stream told him he'd destroyed the Squidy gun battery. Others around it lit up with fire and secondaries.
He was still headed right for the hull, but to get off the collision course on a path that avoided the rest of the Lancers' and Hellcats' fire, Jordo had to rotate on his maneuvering jets and blast out of his line of travel harder than his Bitzer was designed to.
He guessed it was a 45-gee turn as he cut it. Whatever it was, it produced more inertial gees than his inertial negation could counteract. An elephant sat on every inch of him, inside and out. The force of his own maneuver crushed him. His vision grayed over and then went red with all the bursting vessels in his eyes.
In Jordo's next, half-absent seconds, the on-board artificial intelligence in his 151 completed the maneuver he'd initiated. It knew he was losing consciousness. It also knew the maneuver was killing him, but in order to avoid impacting against the Squidy warship's hull, the simple AI was forced to ignore what the maneuver did to the pilot and continue to veer away. At the bottom of the turn, where the inertial gees were heaviest, the last thing Jordo saw through that crimson haze was the broad side of the alien hull.
Then, he was gone, somewhere else, adrift and numb in an incorporeal place where all that remained of the battle were thin, far-off cries on comms. If it's over, then this isn't such a bad way to go, he thought. In less than a millisecond, Jordo made his peace with it and embraced a warm and blissful, welcoming darkness. It was a place he wanted to stay, but the chatter on comms still nagged in his living ears. He heard the voices of his pilots. They cut through the peaceful medium in which he floated like invading rays of dawn and convinced Jordo that no matter what he wanted, he wasn't fucking dead yet.
He clawed his way up a well and climbed back to consciousness, back to his pilots, and back to the war.
*****
Matilda Witt said, "No! No! No!" For a moment, it looked as if she wanted to clap her hands over the squadrons projected in front of her and crush them between her palms like so many flies. Instead, she exhaled, stepped back from the tactical display, and said, "Mr. Morrisey, please explain what is happening. Why are the 133rd and 55th attacking out of sequence and not
Jordo saw the golden thread . All the Lancers had different names for it. Gush called it 'the path' and Dirty said it was like a song she instantly knew, but Jordo saw a golden filament stitched through the furball, drawing the perfect path that evaded enemy fire and led him to kill after kill after kill. Now, it drew a perfect line through the waving, alien guns, down through the crisscrossing spider's web of particle beams groping the vacuum to find him.
When he was close enough to reach out and touch the alien gun towers, Jordo spiraled down around a single beam that spat determined and spiteful bursts as if the alien gunners who fired it knew he was coming for them and now, it was personal. Jordo's six autocannon rattled the frame of his fighter, and as he fired, the space to port and starboard and above and below him filled with shells, too. A furious deluge rained down from all the Lancers' guns.
Jordo didn't stop firing as he circled and descended, rolling down, around the beam until the flashes and the secondary detonations at the base of his fire stream told him he'd destroyed the Squidy gun battery. Others around it lit up with fire and secondaries.
He was still headed right for the hull, but to get off the collision course on a path that avoided the rest of the Lancers' and Hellcats' fire, Jordo had to rotate on his maneuvering jets and blast out of his line of travel harder than his Bitzer was designed to.
He guessed it was a 45-gee turn as he cut it. Whatever it was, it produced more inertial gees than his inertial negation could counteract. An elephant sat on every inch of him, inside and out. The force of his own maneuver crushed him. His vision grayed over and then went red with all the bursting vessels in his eyes.
In Jordo's next, half-absent seconds, the on-board artificial intelligence in his 151 completed the maneuver he'd initiated. It knew he was losing consciousness. It also knew the maneuver was killing him, but in order to avoid impacting against the Squidy warship's hull, the simple AI was forced to ignore what the maneuver did to the pilot and continue to veer away. At the bottom of the turn, where the inertial gees were heaviest, the last thing Jordo saw through that crimson haze was the broad side of the alien hull.
Then, he was gone, somewhere else, adrift and numb in an incorporeal place where all that remained of the battle were thin, far-off cries on comms. If it's over, then this isn't such a bad way to go, he thought. In less than a millisecond, Jordo made his peace with it and embraced a warm and blissful, welcoming darkness. It was a place he wanted to stay, but the chatter on comms still nagged in his living ears. He heard the voices of his pilots. They cut through the peaceful medium in which he floated like invading rays of dawn and convinced Jordo that no matter what he wanted, he wasn't fucking dead yet.
He clawed his way up a well and climbed back to consciousness, back to his pilots, and back to the war.
*****
Matilda Witt said, "No! No! No!" For a moment, it looked as if she wanted to clap her hands over the squadrons projected in front of her and crush them between her palms like so many flies. Instead, she exhaled, stepped back from the tactical display, and said, "Mr. Morrisey, please explain what is happening. Why are the 133rd and 55th attacking out of sequence and not
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