Chapter Sixty-Five - It's Art

There are certain art forms that appear and disappear with the waxing and waning of technology. These are often held in high-esteem by a certain type of person. The same type of person who might be nostalgic for a time before their birth and whose understanding of something is complete, but only in the academic sense.

Knowing the name of every steam engine ever made does not mean that they ought to return.

Dogfighting was one such art. The aficionados of the art would wax poetic about their favourite aces of the second world war as though those young men gave a shit about anything but surviving and putting their enemy into the ground.

Fortunately for these fans of a dying art, it made a resurgence.

There came a development near the middle of the second inter-system war. The advent of the snub-fighter (so called because it was like a snub-rifle, a shortened version of popular military-grade standard rifles, and because the term was stolen from some old science-fiction movies). Snub-fighters were simple. Slap an engine in front of a cockpit, give it a gun. Easy.

Was a snub-fighter better than a drone?

In some ways, surprisingly, yes. A drone could be hacked, fooled, could be suborned and reprogrammed.

Sure, drones didn't need to eat or drink and could be left out in space for weeks at a time, but fresh-faced eighteen-year-olds were cheap by the middle of the second inter-system war, and the programming needed to keep those drones better than their competition was not.

So the snub-fighter was born. First used by the Martian fleet then quickly adopted and mass-produced by the Earth Alliance. Even the Jovian moons got in on it. The first fighter aces gained mass acclaim. Propagandists on both sides salivated at the image of a strapping young man or woman who'd taken down the enemy in close-quarters space warfare. Boys and girls everywhere wanted to be that ace.

Snub-fighters grew and changed, picking up new weapon systems, growing tougher and faster and more agile, but always keeping to the same initial mentality. They were small, easy to deploy ships that could move with a degree of independence much greater than a drone with a human in the cockpit.

Of course, when two flights of snub-fighters from opposing factions met, they needed to fight.

Dogfighting, a lost and ancient art, made its triumphant return at long last.

Ivil had seen her share of dogfighting. She'd never participated in it herself. Not unless sweeping aside entire squadrons of pesky Earth Alliance ships counted as participating.

This wouldn't be the first time she was in a ship being attacked, even. Ivil closed her eyes and allowed her senses to spread far beyond the bounds of their shuttle. Soon, everything within a bubble a hundred kilometres wide was within her sight, including the four snub-fighters rushing their way.

She hovered her attention closer. They were professional-looking craft. Three of them were identical, small ships with a flat, triangular body that was lumped out to make room for a pair of small engines. They carried internal magazines filled with smart missiles and a small machine gun set just under the cockpit canopy. It was mounted on a swivel, able to turn and track anything ahead of the fighter.

The fourth ship was quite a bit longer and frankly, rather ugly. A long tube of a ship with a flat 'face' on it. The vessel had a stubby pair of winglets near its front and was very much the kind of design that happened when someone who prized utility above all else was hired.

Stil, its cockpit was large enough for two, which is what it held. The ship had a huge rack of missiles within it, some sixty four of them pointed 'downwards' through a closed hatch, and there were three small turreted guns slapped onto its body.

Less a snub-fighter, and more a pocket gunship, then. It looked like it had all of the manoeuvrability of a drunken racoon stuck in an air vent.

Pixie caught on to their presence almost as soon as Ivil did. Or maybe she was already keeping an eye on the formation and when they twitched towards their shuttle, she was ready.

For now, her fighter stayed its course. She was flying in their shadow, far back, in the wash of their engines. Ivil imagined it was somewhat turbulent back there, and likely dangerous, but with her ship running quiet it would also be a very stealthy place to hide.

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Ships always gave off heat, and so detection in space often relied on picking up infra-red signatures in the dark. A ship with good enough cooling and with something to mask their warmth was as good as invisible. It could be done up in polka-dot pinks and fluorescent paint, and a modern warship might still miss it.

That had happened in the past. The Lunatics enjoyed modifying their ships to a wild extent, and that often meant letting their larger ships run a lot hotter than necessary while bleeding off heat into the void behind them. A perfect place to hide a smaller, more subtle vessel.

"Evelyn," Aurora said calmly. "The captain just pinged me. Did you know about them?"

"The four?" Ivil asked. She didn't want to give all that she knew away just yet.

Aurora nodded tightly. Twenty-Six and Pepper were in a discussion about station etiquette, of all things. Ivil appreciated that Aurora didn't want to worry them just yet.

"I noticed them, yes," she said.

Aurora let out a long breath. She glanced over to Pepper, then leaned in close and whispered, almost subvocally. Her lips barely even moved. "They're going to attack us, aren't they?"

"Probably," Ivil admitted.

"Then what are we doing?" Aurora asked.

Ivil shrugged. "Pixie's taking care of it. Just relax. We're not going to be involved. This isn't our fight."

"And you're sure Pixie can handle this?"

"Of course."

The fighters moved closer, and Ivil watched as their engines lit up and they surged ahead, closing the distance towards their shuttle. The formation turned into a V, with the three snub-fighters moving ahead and the gunship trailing after them.

Ivil watched as they aimed to intercept their shuttle at some point a few hundred kilometres ahead. They were probably, technically, within firing distances already. Ballistic trajectories counted for a lot in the void of space, but their shuttle had shields and if it threw itself into evasive manoeuvres after they got plinked for the first time, then it would become exponentially harder to hit them.

So their best bet was to get in close, launch a few cheap missiles, then splatter a few hundred rounds against their shields until they broke apart enough to let those missiles slip in.

Pixie seemed ready to do something about that. She peeled out of the engine's wake like a shark coming out of the darkness to chomp on some unsuspecting fish.

She was fast. Faster than the fighters could react to for the moment. Her Nightshade flipped up, rolled around, then opened up with four smart-missiles that screeched out into the void.

The shuttle's klaxon sounded and the lights in their cabin went red.

"Whoa! What's going on?" Twenty-Six asked.

"The shuttle's likely reacting to its sensors seeing a missile," Ivil said. "Don't worry. It's not heading our way."

Indeed, the four missiles were streaking across space towards the snub-fighter and their escorting gunship. There was quite some distance between them still, enough that they had more than half a minute to see their death's incoming.

The snub-fighters launched chaff, and two of them opened fire in the direction of the missiles with their nose-mounted guns.

The third peeled off, and judging from the ungainly way it did so, the pilot was panicking in that moment.

First one, then a second missile burst apart in empty space. Another veered off, caught in the enticing glimmer of the chaff they'd thrown.

The last found a home buried into the belly of that third snub-fighter.

The explosion was probably detectable for quite some ways, Ivil judged. That ship must have been full on fuel.

Pixie rushed forwards towards the fighters, launching a trio of missiles, then another two seconds later. And then she was opening fire with her main guns, streaks of light zipping across towards the snub-fighters.

In terms of raw power, her ship had more guns than all three of her remaining adversaries combined.

But they still had numbers.

One ship started to spin, spitting chaff even as it started evasive manoeuvres that still let it take some pot-shots at Pixie. It let some missiles fly as well.

The gunship did likewise, vomiting out a small torrent of missiles that arced down and around. Pixie, if she wanted to survive this, would first need to break through a wall of incoming explosives.

Ivil felt like maybe she was capable of just that.

***