Throttle Forty-Eight

ChaOS, being the helpful AI that he was, plotted a course that would swing them around in an arc that still headed planetward while also avoiding the bigger part of the swarm of missiles heading their way.

The flight had them passing closer to the downed destroyers. Diana assumed that half the reason fewer missiles would intercept them on that course was because the Bolgians didn’t want to have munitions going off next to friendlies.

Or maybe they only cared about the bigger, more expensive craft.

“Fighters and missiles, incoming,” Abatrath roared.

Lasers lit up empty space, Diana’s screens painting them as red lines across the void that poured off every fighter in their group and tried to intercept the incoming missiles.

There were fewer ballistic missiles this time, likely because their courses were changing too often to make any attacks that couldn’t correct their course viable. What came instead were a whole lot of very loud missiles that bombarded them with junk signals to mask the location of the slightly less-loud projectiles mixed in the swarm.

The Cerberus’ point defence guns opened up, taking out missiles while they were still dozens of kilometres away.

Having nearly every ship, regardless of size, firing at the incoming swarm quickly whittled away at the number of missiles heading their way.

But it wasn’t enough.

ChaOS did the math. It wasn’t particularly difficult math to plot out, though they didn’t have long to work out the numbers. On one axis, the number of missiles, on another, the amount of time left. They’d run out of time before they shot down the last missile.

“Brace,” Diana called. She fired off a command that had more nets launching out, and even the ship’s big guns fired at some of the incoming missiles. Anything to cut down on the number of hits they’d have to take.

In the end, a dozen made it through the overlapping fields of point defence fire. A few were simple high-yield explosives. Judging by the way her sensors went off, they were fusion bombs.

The new suns burned bright and hot for the few seconds they lasted, pelting everything past their blast radius with enough radiation to cook them alive.

Those weren’t too bad. They burst close to, but not in, the centre of their formation. Their shield took the brunt of the radiation damage, and even the few fighters that flew through the edges of the balls of fire left behind by the missiles came out of it intact.

The other kind of missile was a little more nefarious. Their outer casing peeled off, revealing a core made of thousands of small barrels set in a spiralling pattern that mostly faced forwards. The missiles exploded and the Cerberus’ sensors tried in vain to keep track of the thousands of fist-sized projectiles that those missiles launched. They moved far too quickly for anyone to react to them.

Diana winced as one of the fighters that had come with Abatrath was torn apart by one of the projectiles, the fighter craft’s shield bursting apart in a wash of radiation. A split second later, the Cerberus was peppered with similar projectiles, and she frowned at the rattle that sounded out across the ship.

“What was that?” she asked.

“It seems as though the projectiles they’ve used were able to partially bypass our shields. I am not entirely sure how. Damage to the shields was minimal. We are currently at ninety-eight percent efficiency with little power loss. Hull integrity is intact… belay that, one line was damaged on the aft side. A projectile bounced in between two armoured plates and through a bracket. Repairing now. ETA to repair completion: thirty-two seconds.”

“How did they get past our shields though?”

“As I said, I’m not certain. Sensors picked up a small burst of energy next to the point of impact. Do you want me to dedicate some processing power to discovering how they bypassed our shields?”

“Please do,” Diana said. “As long as we have the computing power to spare.”

ChaOS dinged an affirmative. “I will note that the projectiles only bypassed one layer of shielding in the few places where shield sections overlap. It would lower shield efficiency in most cases to cast a second over the first, as the shield layers would interfere with each other, but it might be a temporary solution to these new munitions.”

Diana hummed. “Look into implementing something to avoid that problem with stage two. Maybe a second shield on some pylons, far enough from the main body not to interfere?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Noted.”

“Fighters incoming,” Abatrath said.

Diana glanced at the holographic map to her right. Space was filled with pinpricks that represented the incoming fighters, but those would only be reaching them in a couple dozen seconds. They’d be far closer to the flagship by then.

“I think we should slow down,” Diana said.

“That would be stupid,” Abatrath replied.

“Exactly. They won’t expect it,” Diana said. She zoomed out on the system map and searched for the dots that represented other competitors. Their group was near the front, but they weren’t the fastest. Another group had slingshotted around the planet at a much faster pace and was slipping into the atmosphere not too far from the capital.

Another group, larger than hers, was pressing into the section of the blockade to the north. At least, north as far as the planet’s gravity was concerned. ChaOS had arbitrarily called the two poles north and south to make it easier to keep track of things. The northern end of the blockade had the fewest larger ships, so the racers there were charging headlong into swarms of fighters and a few destroyers backed by a carrier and its escorts.

More were coming in behind them, from a few different angles too. Soon the blockade would be overwhelmed by racers. Not outnumbered, and certainly not outgunned, but still in a troubling situation.

They had to take care of dozens of different threats coming in from many angles, all of which would be acting unpredictably.

Diana wanted to add to that unpredictableness.

She pulled back on the throttle and feathered the reverse thrusters. Abatrath and the others took a moment to do the same. She heard some mutters over the shared comms, but nothing too mutinous.

Then everyone was too busy with the incoming wave of fighters to be angry about Diana’s new plan.

The fighters shot past their position, spinning around as they did so to fire at the racers. At the same time, the group laid into the oncoming craft with whatever they had, ripping through shields and battering the ships with enough return fire that a few of them were torn apart in the passing.

They were approaching the flagship though, and it showed.

A reasonable person would have sped up then, using the cover provided by the Bolgian fighters as a way to slip past the blockade.

But that flagship was worth a whole one thousand points. Enough that the sight of it had Diana reconsidering all of her previous plans.

“You are aware that it outmasses and outguns us considerably, mistress,” ChaOS said.

“Yeah, but it’s just sitting there,” she whined.

“Mistress,” ChaOS said with a warning tone.

She shook her head. “Fine. But we’re going to take potshots at it as we go by.”

“As you wish.”

And then she was too busy to keep up any sort of conversation with ChaOS.

The fighter ships coming from further away arced around so that they were crossing paths with the racers from steeper and steeper angles until eventually they were matching velocity and direction.

The fighting went from quick glancing blows to a proper close-quarters dogfight, with ships shifting and speeding after each other with only hundreds of metres to spare between each other. Some of the Bolgian Probers carried missiles on underbelly carriages, which only added to the chaos as the racers had to decide who to target first.

Lasers filled the space around them, more often than not missing their targets or glancing off shields to create brilliant blue sparkles in space. The Probers had mass-accelerators too, big guns that took up nearly as much room on the little ships as their entire engine assembly.

Diana itched to join in, but the Cerberus, while an excellent ship, wasn’t exactly designed for dogfighting.

She ducked and wove around some stray fire, and when a trio of fighters shot out ahead of her, she gleefully chased them down for a few moments while keeping most of her heading towards the flagship, but for the most part, the others were taking care of the fighters with only the occasional bit of help from her point defence.

ChaOS was keeping the Cerberus’ guns focused on stray missiles, tapping them out of the air as soon as they were fired. It gave the racers a much needed edge.

And then they were up against the flagship.

The Pride of Bolgia loomed before her.

***