High Over Crater Ridge, Shakes Run, Lyndon
ComStar Intervention Zone, Lyran Commonwealth
13 May 3051 (Day 6 of the Battle of Lyndon)
The crater rims glowed a furious rose gold in the early dawn light, the hard line of night rolling down their slopes as Lyndon's sun leapt into the sky. Flitting high above them and snapping at the heels of a Gotha pack, five black and red Visigoths rolled and weaved in the early morning light, lasers and autocannons flashing as they spat death through the air. Her guns live, Sidonie turned and rolled in on them; her Lighting, Boudica, trembling with power as its fusion drive opened its throat.
To her left, she saw one Gotha explode in a sudden blue-white flash, while to her right, another pitched over and began to plummet, trailing thick black smoke as it curved towards the ground. An instant later, two Visigoths slipped under her while a third slotted neatly into her targeting reticle thanks to an ill-timed turn. The black crosshairs turned green.
One, she counted as she thumbed the firing stud.
Boudica lurched backwards as it unleashed its arsenal, piercing beams flying out of her machine and spearing into the bandit's rear. Struck somewhere vital, a shower of debris spraying out behind the Clan OmniFighter, the Visigoth rolled over and staggered drunkenly, then started to make grey smoke as it dropped away, falling and falling towards the crater-strewn expanse below. In the blink of an eye, the Clanner machine vanished from sight as she burned past, the ComGuard pilot pulling her ASF into a shallow turn as she made ready for another pass, G-forces pressing an invisible hand against her chest.
"Bagged one," Sidonie coolly spoke into her mask. "Three-one Leader to flight, I have engaged. Repeat, I have engaged."
Registering Masin's response only distantly, Sidonie completed her turn just in time to see the man engage one of the two surviving Clan fighters, his Royal Lightning's lasers strobing as it rocketed past.
"Negative kill on that one, Three-two," she reported as the aggressively painted machine kicked its engines to full and burned to gain altitude—the counter in her HUD ticking up by the thousands.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Instinctually, she noted that the surviving bandits had ceased their attacks on the Gothas, the three surviving machines pushing their engines as hard as they would go as they wheeled in the sky. Doubtless, they would make for ComStar's nearest airfield.
Good, she thought, fewer targets to track.
Slewing Boudica around to bring its hefty gauss rifle to bear on the rapidly shrinking figure, she said, "Kappa flight, engage the Bandits by pairs. Gotha flight, bounce out of here. We've got you covered."
In the corner of her eyes, something flickered.
Instincts screaming, Sidonie threw her Lightning to the side, the world turning into a blur as the war machine rolled. An instant later, something black and terrible roared by. A lethal blur. An impression of sparkling laser lights.
Then she steadied her roll, and the world snapped back into sharp relief, a stolen glance showing the second Visigoth banking into a turn. A heartbeat later, four more blurs raced past Sidonie, the white-painted Lightnings buffeting her own with their boiling wakes. Driving the fleeing Visigoth from her mind, the rest of Kappa flight sure to keep it occupied, she returned her attention to the runner, the cruciform fighter a good five klicks above her and already turning back around.
Opening the throttle, the ComGuard pilot threw her ASF into a steep climb after it, fusion fire hurling her towards the cobalt skies at a speed few conventional craft could match.
"On your seven," crackled Masin's voice over the radio, a sixth sense telling her that the shadow on her back was his.
Acknowledging his presence with a curt response, Sidonie kept her eyes locked on the distant Visigoth, the Fire Mandrill OmniFighter snapping its beweaponed prow onto her. Pressing right rudder, she jerked her reticle over the approaching machine, a thumb press sending Boudica trembling as the gauss rifle spat a slug over the Clanner's shoulder and into the endless blue yonder. A moment later, Masin followed suit, his gauss rifle clipping the fighter's wing and tearing off a spray of armour.
An alarm chirped in her ear.
Unthinkingly, Sidonie jerked her joystick to the right, Boudica following suit so quickly it was almost as if it were alive. Before her mind could catch up to her body, lasers scorched the air she'd been in a moment before, a swarm of SRMs chasing them. Gasping for breath, redoubled gravity pressing her mask against her face, Sidonie felt more than heard the impact of the Visigoth's LB-10 X against her hull; a shudder running through Boudica as cluster rounds tore fistfuls of armour from its body. Then the bandit went right by her, overshooting, its passage so close she could see the bone-white kill marks painted just below its canopy.
Batarde! She cursed as it vanished from sight, her canopy polarising as the light of its fusion drive drenched her.
"Masin, detach," she commanded before throwing her ASF into an Immelmann turn, trusting her wingman to do as she wished even as an elephant sat on her chest. In less time than it took to describe, Sidonie found herself flying back the way she came, an involuntary gasp escaping her as the pressure on her chest relieved.
Craning her neck from side to side, the woman scoured the sky for the black-painted Visigoth.
Where the hell are you? She asked herself as a glance at her HUD confirmed that Masin had indeed detached and was now holding three thousand metres east and one thousand high. Where? Where? Where?
There!
Faster than her Lightning in a straight line thanks to an engine that provided fifty percent more power, the cruciform fighter was already well out of range and turning hard around again. Narrowing her eyes at the sight of the blazing tail that followed the craft as it struggled to turn, Sidonie grinned beneath her mask as she spotted the pilot's error. Doubtless, the Visigoth's pilot had decided that high-speed passes were the only way they could win against their ComStar opponents, the Prime configuration having only seventy percent of the range that Sidonie enjoyed. In accelerating as hard as they had to get past her, the Visigoth's pilot had traded turn rate for velocity.
Opening her throttle once more, Sidonie closed a hand around a control that hadn't been there six months ago and held it there, the rubber stick incongruously new compared to the worn metal of a long-used cockpit. Bringing her nose to bear on the still-distant fighter, she pulsed her lasers almost casually, the emerald green beams sailing harmlessly past the Visigoth but forcing its pilot to jitter and lose precious seconds in their turn, nonetheless. An instant later, they faced one another, and—almost simultaneously—lock and warning tones began to sound.
The Visigoth's pilot didn't hesitate, and neither did she.
Simultaneously wrenching her joystick towards her and the newly installed control down, Sidonie groaned as Boudica pitched its nose up and fell down. Filling her cockpit with a whine she could feel in her teeth, the Helghan-made anti-gravity drive retrofitted into the Star League fighter manipulated a fundamental force of the universe to drop her aerospace fighter nine metres in under a second, the Visigoth's storm of fire passing harmlessly overhead. Already releasing the anti-gravity drive control, Sidonie fired everything she had as the bandit crossed her line of fire, her lasers and gauss rifle sending piercing bolts into its left wing.
Then, just as quickly as their duel began, it ended, the Clan OmniFighter sweeping past wounded but alive.
"No kill! No kill!" She snarled into her mask as she fought to regain speed, the downwards manoeuvre having eaten up much of her energy.
Twisting her head to follow the dark fighter, Sidonie felt a frisson of concern for the first time since entering combat as it began to turn. Then Masin returned to the fight.
Rolling upside down in the blink of an eye, Masin pitched his aircraft down and dove on the Visigoth like a hawk on prey. His lasers sparkling as he came, the bandit suddenly fireballed, and Masin's Lightning rolled back upright as it swept through the flames; a cone of orange fire and greasy black smoke dragged behind by his slipstream.
Kill steal, she thought wryly as she scanned the sky, her fears forgotten in the kill's wake. Almost immediately, she spotted the last Clan OmniFighter busy spinning towards the ground with one less wing than it had started with.
Rising to Angels Ten—the heavens clear for her and her pilots—Sidonie put her ASF into a holding pattern and watched the retreating Gothas with one eye even as she opened a channel to the rest of the flight. "Three-two, good kill."
Masin laughed, the Terran's voice a bass rumble. "Likewise, Mechhead. Thanks for getting it in position."
She snorted. "Anytime, Bambi."
"You hit one deer..."
Grinning at the man's put-upon tone, Sidonie turned her attention to the cobalt skies, the black spots that made up the rest of Kappa flight moving to join her Lightning with imperious indolence. To her relief, all six members of the Level II formation were flying clear and true. It had been her favourite kind of engagement: she'd held all the cards.
"Chalice, good work on the guidance. They never knew we were coming," she continued after a momentary pause, her words transmitted via radio to an AWACS orbiting Blake-knew-where.
"Roger that, Kappa lead," came the response from the airborne radar, the man seemingly unmoved by her praise. "Be advised that the package is five Mikes from the rendezvous point and closing. Expect them on bearing one-nine-three, confirm?"
Sidnonie shook her head. "Kappa lead confirms, Chalice."
Idly scanning the sky for any hint of their soon-to-be escortees, Sidonie thought, not for the first time, how strange it was to be directed by the airborne radar system's operators, their godlike remove from the battlespace offering them an equally godlike view of all entities flying within it. Like the anti-gravity drive installed in Boudica, the system hailed from the Helghan Republic, and the ComGuard's air wings, Kappa included, had drilled religiously in its operation in the months leading to their deployment on Lyndon.
Laughing silently at her joke, Sidonie cleared her throat with a quiet cough and continued. "Any hostiles in the AO we should be aware of?"
"Nothing on radar yet," the man replied instantaneously. "But command is tracking a cluster's worth of Wolves making a suborbital hop to Toledo; looks like they're hitting the Fifth hard."
"Confirm. Thanks for the intel. Keep us updated if anything changes, and stay safe up there."
"Good hunting," the operator replied, the slightest hint of warmth entering his voice as he signed off.
Shame it isn't this way all the time, she thought as she worked her controls, her radio clicking over to the general channel after a moment's delay. "Gotha flight, this is Kappa lead. What happened out here? Do you require assistance?"
Sidonie waited for what felt like an age but could only have been a few seconds, and then an unfamiliar voice responded, the woman's curt words and thick accent roughened by a burr that spoke of barked orders and furious g-forces.
"Negative, Kappa lead. The kusohezzu roughed us up, but there's an airfield a hundred klicks on two-one-five. We can make it, Blake willing."
"Understood. Sorry we couldn't get here sooner; did your boys and girls get chutes out?"
"Two for three."
She pursed her lips. It wasn't a bad result, and the terrain below wasn't innately hostile to human life, but ASF units tended to be a close-knit bunch.
Watching the Gothas continue their retreat, she repeated her question. "What happened?"
The woman fell silent, Sidonie's radio filling the link with the soft hiss and crackle of static. Then she returned, the previous emotion driven from her voice as if by force of will.
"We were tasked against a Fire Mandrill mech Star—flying low level—when the bandits hit us coming over a crater wall. We had to dump externals and abort the strike to engage; things looked pretty bad until you intervened."
"Just doing our job," Sidonie lied. "Thanks for the sitrep; we'll take it from here."
Signing off with a friendly goodbye, Sidonie shook her head in the privacy of her cockpit before switching over to her flight's private channel, the silence holding for a fraction of a second before one of her pilots chose to break it.
"So much for command's intel," Adept O'Neill drawled, the FedSun native's words as slow and sleepy as the farm he claimed to have grown up on. "This place is chockers with Clanners, ey?"
Masin snorted, the man's fighter somewhere to her two o'clock. "It wouldn't be military intelligence if it was accurate."
"Where did they come from, anyway?" The flight's fourth and youngest member asked, the twenty-one-year-old Parra's voice as high and clear as a bell, their words almost Clanish in their scrupulous formality.
"Reckon one of them bootlegger fields, probably," O'Neill replied casually. "Heard from old mate at the O Club that this place used to have tons of them."
"They finally let you into the Officer's Club?" Jibei asked instantly, his words prompting Adept Dane—the sixth member—to chuckle softly at his incredulous tone.
"Couldn't stop me if they tried, mate."
"Used too?" Sidonie asked, ignoring the pair's brief verbal joust to cut to the meat of O'Niell's words.
"Yeah. There were a few platinum mines up north a couple decades ago They used to fly crowd killers stuffed with grog up for the miners and bring back some of the metal off the record for the bosses. The mines went dry, and so did the booze, but the runways are still out here."
"Untracked airfields," Masin grumbled over a private channel. "We weren't expecting that."
"It doesn't change our orders," Sidonie countered, despite privately agreeing. "We still need to clear the way ahead of the package; this just complicates it a little."
Bambi snorted derisively, then seemed to relent.
"Looks like they'll need it."
Something in Masin's timbre tweaked Sidonie's instincts, the words a flick on the nose despite their distracted air.
Giving Boudica a slight roll as she continued her long orbit, the ComGuard pilot frowned as she saw what had grabbed the man's attention. Stretching from one end of the horizon to the other and as pockmarked as the skin beneath her breathing mask, the ground ten kilometres below her aircraft was one long field of impact craters littered with signs of battle—columns of smoke, shifting dust clouds, and the tell-tale sparkle of refracted laser light telling of the fighting that raged on their dun-coloured slopes. Everywhere she looked, the sight was the same.
They've taken the first objective, she thought coldly as a vast gout of flame rose into the air some kilometres distant, the pinky nail-sized flare vanishing from sight as she rolled her Lightning back upright. Bon Dieu, that's bad.
She wasn't sure the drones would make a difference, but then there was only one way to find out.
"Alright, Kappa flight," she said, switching back to the flight link and forcing her tone as level as her flight. "Looks like the Clanners have decided to amp up the party earlier than expected; I'm seeing groundfire way past where it should be."
"We switching to ground strike?" O'Neill asked, uncharacteristically professional.
Sidonie sucked her teeth. "Negative, Three-four. Until we get orders otherwise, we hold this position until the strike package gets here and then escort as planned."
"Speaking of..." Dane prompted, the woman's words grabbing Sidonie's attention near instantly. "Contacts bearing one-nine-three. Three big ones and six small ones, and right on time. Looks like our guys."
Right again, Chalice, the thought ran through her head as she spied Dane's targets in the far-off sky, perhaps a dozen klicks away, the black blurs growing with stultifying lethargy.
Long and fat with a wingspan of a little over eighty metres, the three converted Skymaster cargo planes dragged themselves through the air gracelessly, the aircraft hauled from Terra by a ComGuard in dire need of their prodigious cargo capacity. From this distance, there was no way of telling how they'd been modified, though she had it on good authority that they were now the fastest Skymasters in the galaxy; each plane's four turboprops replaced with best-in-class alternatives. Flying around them in a protective shell, the half-dozen sleek fighters escorting them seemed restless in their motions.
Big cats prowling the edges of their cage, Sidonie thought, eyeing them.
"Good catch, Carrot," she replied as she drove the thought from her mind, a twitch hauling her fighter around towards the approaching aircraft. "Kappa, form up on my wing. Command wants these cochons in one piece when they reach the drop site."
"Intercept in three minutes," Masin's voice crackled over the radio. "We'll reach the target just under fourteen."
O'Neill snorted. "Nah, yeah, if the cunts let us."
"Can the chatter, Kappa. I want a smooth handover and a smoother drop."
Opening her throttle as talk amongst the flight died away, Sidonie couldn't help but wonder if it would be as easy as she'd made it out to be.
***
One-tenth cloud and light north-easterly wind. A powder blue blanket of sky dotted with the occasional cotton ball cloud.
Sidonie led the turn east, watching as the massive cargo planes hauled after her, their prior escort replaced by Kappa flight and already powering home to rest, rearm, and refit. It was the final minutes before the drop, the last time something could go wrong, and her body felt like a cable straining under tension.
"Three-one Leader, this is Chalice. Respond."
The man's words were short, sharp, and strained, an undercurrent of worry prickling Sidonie's ears as his voice buzzed from her radio. Instantly, she snapped her eyes to the horizon—pale blue transitioning to a verminous brown where the sky met the earth—and scoured it for any signs of hostiles.
"Chalice," she answered quickly, empty sky meeting her eyes. "This is three-one Leader. "
"Report as follows: Radar contact five kilometres out and closing. Count is unclear, but at least one Star en route. Expect an intercept in one Mike. Repeat: One Mike. They came out of nowhere; must be flying low."
Sidonie hissed a curse and reached for her radio switch, pausing just long enough to say, "Understood, Chalice. Responding now."
"Negative, Three-one Leader; report has not concluded." She froze mid-motion, her hand halfway to the switch and locked tight.
"Be advised that a Star from the Wolf suborbital cluster has diverged from the pack. Looks like they'll come down on top of you in the next few minutes."
She cursed again.
"Anti-orbit forces will attempt to engage, and we're scrambling a QRF, but we can't make any promises. You need to get that package on site."
Sighing, Sidonie shook her head, her neck creaking in protest at the motion. "Roger that, Chalice. We'll get it there on time. Get us whatever support you can, and we'll do the rest. Three-one Leader out."
"Good luck," the faceless operator replied as he signed off, his words drifting from her mind like smoke in the wind as she raced to prepare for the onrushing attack.
In a dogfight, a minute was as long as an age. Before one, it was shorter than a heartbeat.
Switching back to the flight channel—the Skymasters included—Sidonie didn't mince her words as she repeated Chalice's warnings, a string of curses from the transports' crews answering her. Heavily laden and driven by turboprops rather than jets or fusion drives, the cargo planes were ponderous and slow. Missile bait was the slang term.
"Contact front!" Adept Dane barked after what felt too short a time. "Bearing zero-one-three. Low down and rising."
Adjusting her heading, Sidonie felt a grimace form as she spied Dane's targets racing towards them, the quintet of dots fighting for altitude now that they'd made it close. Two Sullas, Two Jagatais, and a Turk. Three hundred-plus tons of Clan metal.
Sidonie's voice was hard as ice and just as cold. Four words. "By pairs. Kill them."
Dane rolled away left with Parra, O'Neill and Jibei mirroring the move to the right. A glance showed Masin staying at her seven until they were right into the brawl, then broke left as she split off. As if someone had flipped a light switch, the air was full of strobing lasers and screaming missiles, dancing machines and streamers of contrails, fusion flares and smoke.
There were too many objects to track on a conscious level. Too many places demanded her attention. Honed by long practice, her mind reduced the world to its absolute basics; everything outside the small bubble of sky containing the eleven aircraft forgotten about as she reduced the universe to just herself, her flight, and the enemy.
A Sulla—red and orange—roared over her right wing, going the other way. No point even thinking about it. Another—a Turk—climbing hard for the world's roof. She wouldn't catch it. There at her four! No. A Lightning, sunlight glinting off its white painted skin as it turned.
Keep jinking, keep moving, keep twisting, keep dancing.
A bandit there! Sidonie dropped her Lighting onto the weaving Jagatai in the blink of an eye, her thumb pressing the firing stud as the OmniFighter hoved into her targeting reticle. Sparks flashed along its back as she loosed every laser she had, and then it was gone; she had overflown it.
A voice. Calm and level. Jibei. "Gauss rifle not responding. Gotta get in closer."
She banked around again, and a carmine bandit went across her nose. Without thinking, she clenched his thumb and felt Boudica shudder as its gauss rifle lit off. Had she hit it? Chances were low, but not zero.
There, another!
She kicked the rudder and rolled left, a scarlet Sulla streaking past underneath her. It was gunning for one of her Lightnings, stuck to its six. The ASF was bucking wildly, but the OmniFighter wouldn't shake loose. Her hand moving automatically, she pulled her Lightning into a tight turn—an elephant's foot slamming down on her chest—and activated the anti-gravity drive to make it tighter, her reticle aligning on the Sulla's engines faster than mere aerodynamics would have allowed.
It must have seen her pull the trick as it broke away, a flick of its wings sending it scudding through the sky. But Sidonie's instincts were as keen as ever. As the OmniFighter pulled off, she followed it, her cockpit flooding with heat as every weapon aboard Boudica blazed away at the root of its fusion drive. A heartbeat later, the fighter disintegrated in a spray of debris, and pieces of metal the size of her finger pinged off Boudica's hull as she tore through the flames of the Sulla's death.
The thought came unbidden. That's two.
Immediately, a shrill alarm sounded. Tone lock. Something on top of her. Without thinking, Sidonie pulsed her anti-gravity engines, negative G's sending the blood rushing to her head as Boudica made an impossible movement. Bright red tracers filled the air before her, the stream cutting off as another Jagatai whipped past.
"Blake's blood!" A man shouted as she pulled her fighter into a wing-over turn, a glance at her HUD showing O'Neill's armour dropping precipitously.
Eject! She ordered silently as his fighter came into view, fire streaming from its back as lasers caressed it. As if hearing her words, the Lightning's canopy ripped off in a flash of smoke, a dark blur suddenly blasting forth. Within moments, O'Neill's parachute caught the air, and the man jerked to a near halt in the cerulean sky. Then he was gone, replaced by another Lighting racing toward her.
"Jump," Masin commanded calmly.
Sidonie didn't hesitate, a jerk of the controls sending her Lighting leaping for the sky. A split second later, a gauss rifle slug shot beneath Boudica's hull, and a flare of blue-white light pulsed from the top of her HUD as the Turk chasing her exploded, its death bursting across the compressed feed of the world behind her.
"Good kill!" She gasped despite her lungs' weight, Masin acknowledging with a grunt.
"He's going for the transports!" Parra suddenly cried, the rookie's voice cracking with emotion.
There was no time for fancy flying. Automatically, Sidonie slammed her Lightning into a turn and strained her neck despite the Gs to catch sight of the Skymasters. In a flash, she had it, the Jagatai bearing down on the lumbering aircraft, pale smoke trailing from its wing. Time seemed to slow as she struggled to bring her reticle to bear, and then a stream of fire spat from the OmniFighter's nose.
Little more than a glorified cargo haulier modified to be faster than usual and host an ECM unit, the lead Skymaster had little defence against the Jagatai's Ultra AC/20. In the blink of an eye, a dozen 120mm rounds slammed into the Skymaster's sea-grey wing and holes as wide across as Sidonie's head appeared one after another, smoke and fire blossoming all down the length of the flying surface. Without warning, it detonated.
The Skymaster burned bright, like a suddenly lit sun, a torus of hellish orange flame racing outwards behind a wave of dark shrapnel that peppered its nearby siblings. Despite her fighter's anti-glare systems, she winced at the light, a bruise-purple afterimage searing itself into her vision before she could look away. Time accelerated. Her reticle fell onto the Jagatai, and she pressed the firing stud. As if by magic, it changed from aircraft to brick, the red and orange bird plummeting toward the ground amidst a cloud of twisted metal as it died.
Three, she thought as she passed through the space the fighter had occupied mere seconds ago and pulled to the right.
Then, a scream cut short by a burst of static.
"Parra!" Dane shouted, the redhead's words grabbing Sidonie's attention by the throat.
Snapping her head around, muscles straining against the force of the turn, Sidonie caught a glimpse of the remaining Sulla rocketing through a starburst of smoke before it vanished beneath her, the front half of a Lightning tumbling to the ground behind it with every inch ablaze. Caught off guard, Sidonie could only watch as Dane burst through the smoke after it, her lasers firing one after another as the rookie's wingman sent ravening energy beams after the Clanner. A moment later, an orange flash signified the unseen Sulla's death—a bitter satisfaction filling Sidonie's heart before a voice crackled over the radio, meaningless words assailing her ears.
Clearing her throat with a rasp, she slammed open the link and, tossing her Lightning into another series of jukes, said. "Repeat that last!"
"Chalice repeating," the unwelcome voice of the AWACS operator barked. "I say again, three-one Leader: the wolves are arriving at your AO, and sub-capitals are engaging now. I recommend those bombers dump ASAP."
Eyes widening behind her mask, Sidonie tore her gaze from her instruments and cast it skywards, five pinpricks of light catching her attention. Angled off her nose and coming in hot, the artificial meteors tore a hole through the sky as they plunged towards the aerial battlefield, a gossamer-thin trail of plasma streaking behind them courtesy of their terrible velocity and a bow shock of equally bright plasma flaring before them. Pinned by her eyes, the quintet seemed to hang high in the sky like stars.
A heartbeat passed, and then the world turned emerald as an unseen laser opened fire, the flash blindingly bright despite Boudica's polarised canopy. Just as quickly as it appeared, the beam snapped off, a blinking Sidonie spying a luminescent cloud where its target had been. Then Boudica seemed to hit an invisible wall, pilot and fighter alike thrown upwards as the air superheated by the laser's passage slammed into her fighter's exposed belly. Dazed by the blow's violence, Sidonie moved almost instinctively to keep the plane flying, each wild buck the sudden gale brought countered by pulses of fusion flame.
Her attention consumed by the effort to keep flying, the ComStar pilot felt more than saw the second firing, another blast of forge-hot air throwing her upwards. Then, as if she'd flown into another sky completely, Boudica burst out the other side of the scalding column, the turbulence vanishing as if it had never existed.
"Blake's bloody balls!" She gasped as her fighter steadied and the unseen guns fell silent; only three Wolf fighters left plunging through Lyndon's skies.
Flicking her eyes up, Sidonie cursed again as she discovered how far she'd flown from the furball, the compressed video view at the top of her HUD showing her three remaining comrades kilometres away and getting further. Busy tearing strips from the surviving Jagatai—its pilot desperately weaving through the air—the others were too far behind to reach her before the approaching wolves finished their descent. With a coolness that belied the seriousness of her error, she realised that she was on her own.
Rookie mistake, she thought.
Closing fast—faster than almost any bullet ever fired in anger—and unable to turn away from the Clanners before they were in range, there was no time to wonder what kind of craft lurked behind the blinding plasma surrounding the Clan meteors, nor was there time for cleverness or forethought. Instead, Sidonie breathed deep and spoke.
"Kappa flight, this is three-one Leader. I'm engaging the wolves now. Skymasters: Dump your loads. Let's see how the Batardes like getting swarmed."
Her guns live, Sidonie rolled in on them; her Lighting, Boudica, trembling as its fusion drive opened its throat, and her weapons blazing.
