Throttle Forty-Nine

“We need to take out some of these fighters,” Abatrath said.

“Why?” Diana asked absently. Her attention was on the flagship. The vessel filled half her vision from the front of the Cerberus and it was still a few kilometres away. Fighter craft were launching out of its sides, one every couple of seconds. They were starting to fill the space where Diana was planning to pass.

She continued to slow down in fits and starts, with the occasional burst of sideways thrust to mess with enemy targeting.

The flagship clearly had an ample amount of point-defence guns, but there was nothing substantial between the weapons it carried to ward off missiles and the large guns designed to go toe-to-toe with a capital ship.

That gap was clearly meant to be filled by escort craft and its complement of fighters and bombers.

“If we fly past them and start dropping through the atmosphere, it will be with entire squadrons of fighters at our backs,” Abatrath said. “We won’t be able to manoeuvre as well while entering the planet’s close-orbit, and most of us can’t fire at anything behind us. We need to get them off our trail here.”

Diana glanced at the plotter pinpointing the location of every ship her scanners picked up. The Bolgian fighters were swarming around, but it wasn’t a chaotic, purposeless motion. They were forming flights of five, with the ships taking on a plus-formation when seen from ahead.

“Okay,” Diana said. “Let’s disperse. Keep an eye out on the flagship; they probably won’t fire at us from elsewhere if it means hitting it, but that doesn’t mean the ship is toothless. Zil Rossi, can you stick close? Got a feeling we’ll be attracting our share of attention.”

“Understood,” Zil Rossi said. Diana noted the Foxtail hovering closer in her ship’s wake.

“Break up, everyone. Keep your attention peeled to avoid friendly fire. If you don’t like your odds in a close quarters fight, then you can try running planet-ward,” Abatrath said.

“We won’t be heading down as a group?” Diana asked.

“It makes more sense not to,” he replied. “The danger of heading down to the planet is the same for them as it is for us. If we leave in smaller groups, then we can watch each other’s backs.”

It would be awful for the last one to head down, of course, and Diana imagined that not every racer would be heading in the same direction. Still, she couldn’t fault his logic, not when they were all competing against each other as well as the Bolgian space navy.

Diana broke off to her left and punched up her throttle a notch. She started to fly in a gentle arc over the top of the Pride of Bolgia, one eye on the flagship while she took quick glances to her displays that highlighted the location of every nearby fightercraft.

The bigger number of ships was on the side of the flagship where they’d descended, but there were plenty of ships hiding in the Pride’s shadow. Likely those who would be racing down to tag them from behind if they raced planet-ward.

As she moved, a few sensors flashed. Her ship was being targeted.

Diana’s eyes narrowed as a few of the Pride of Bolgia’s bigger guns started to turn her way. Diana twisted her nose down and pulled closer to the ship. “ChaOS, give me an idea of where their shields are.”

“Noted. Adding an overlay.”

A glowing grid appeared over the Pride of Bolgia on her screens, not so glaring that she couldn’t see the ship beneath, but good enough to tell her what to avoid if she didn’t plan on ramming into the ship’s shield.

Diana pulled a little closer to the flagship, skimming just over the grid until the passing lines were a blur next to her, like streetlights zipping by on a highway. “ChaOS, ECM,” she said.

“Deploying electronic counter-measures,” ChaOS said.

The Cerberus rattled as missiles launched out of it. Six in all, they flew off in different directions for a moment before all of them started to blast out junk data.

One flew just a little too close to the flagship and skipped off the shield, the missile flying apart from the impact.

That, somehow, triggered a massive change aboard the ship.

The point-defence guns, previously quiet except for their slow cracking, opened up. Space filled with a thousand lasers flying off in every direction as the ship targeted the racers.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. The smaller ships were fast and changing directions constantly. A few were stuck in close dog-fights with Bolgian fighters that had them looping around and strafing in all sorts of directions.

Some had been destroyed already, and a number of Bolgian ships had been taken out as well, adding large chunks of scrap metal to the confusing chaos of an all-out brawl. Those served as chaff, and the no-doubt artificial minds behind the point-defence systems couldn’t tell them apart from active ships.

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Still, Diana’s coms filled with chatter as the racers had to deal with a new, pressing threat.

Diana didn’t have much time to sympathise. The Cerberus was close, it was big, and it had just launched missiles within less than a kilometre of the flagship’s hull.

Two dozen lasers fired through tiny holes in the flagship’s shields and painted themselves across the Cerberus’ own shield arrays. She winced as she saw her shield integrity counting down a couple of percentage points per second.

“ChaOS,” she said.

“What do you wish to do, mistress?” the AI asked.

She needed to not be fired upon. A distraction? More decoys? Of the six she’d fired, one had hit the shields and splattered itself, two more had been taken out already by point-defence fire, another had gained a tail, some Bolgian fighters darting after it.

“Prep an EMP,” Diana said.

“We might take out our allies,” ChaOS replied.

“We’ll fire it in the flagship’s shadow. It’ll shield them.”

ChaOS took a split second to reply. “We will need to launch and detonate it in close proximity to the flagship’s side so that its shields deflect most of the explosive force.”

“Do it,” she said.

“We will still be within range. While the Cerberus is designed to resist that kind of attack, it is not entirely capable of preventing any damage from it.”

Diana hesitated, but time wasn’t on her side. She crested the edge of the flagship and came onto its other side. The fighters gathered there lit up her forward screen, six dozen angry red circles over tiny specs of grey no bigger than a micro-pixel.

“Fire everything we have,” she said. “We’re moving to phase two early. Prep for a very hard re-entry.”

“… Understood, mistress.”

“Zil Rossi,” Diana said.

“Yes?” the ktacha asked.

“Split off. Can you reach those fighters over there?”

Zil Rossi took a moment to reply. “You are aware that I’d be outnumbered to a ridiculous extent?”

“I’m about to do something very stupid that might help with that. Keep your shields up, and hang on tight.”

Diana spun the Cerberus around so that it kept flying past the flagship, but its nose was pointing to the bigger vessel. She hardly needed to aim when her target was like a metaphorical barn pressed up against her face. The ship’s railguns fired, over and over again even as coolant pumped into the gun housings and tried to chill them off.

Her point-defence guns went off as well, spraying tens of thousands of rounds into the Pride’s sides. The chance of any one round hitting the ship was minuscule. They were too small to do much against the flagship’s shields, but if they still lowered the shields to fire from the big guns, then there was a chance that a few hundred rounds would slip through and pepper the bulkhead full of holes.

If the people captaining the ship were smart, they’d just wait her out. She’d run out of ammunition long before the flagship ran out of power to keep its shields going.

That’s what she hoped, at least.

“Missiles reconfigured,” ChaOS said. “Ready to fire on your command, mistress.”

“Fire everything,” she said with relish.

All along the Cerberus’ hull, panels slid open and missiles roared out of the ship. Then more followed those.

Net-missiles rushed out towards the fighters who were mostly stationary still, normal high-yield explosives raced away, with some decoys leading and trailing after them to confuse any point defence.

Then came the big guns.

“EMP out,” ChaOS said. “Shutting off all main systems now.”

The Cerberus went dark. Half of her systems flicked off, and she was only left with a few essential read-outs and some camera feeds to tell her what was going on.

A brace of missiles raced around her, bigger and slower than her other missiles.

A few were picked off by the Pride of Bolgia’s lasers, but those didn’t matter.

“Shields are at maximum potency. We cannot push any more power into them without damaging the arrays,” ChaOS said.

“Good, good,” Diana said. She removed her hands from the controls. What came next wasn’t something she could change.

The darkness of space, with only the sun reflecting off of the flagship and the green-brown planet below to fill it, lit up as her EMPs detonated, a wave of disturbed particles zipping through space as if someone had taken one of Jupiter’s great storms, shoved it into a bottle, then shattered it in the void.

***