The Sacred’s dreadnaught laid dying. Floating on its side, it sank through the depths of space. Jacob envied the Sacred's engineering. The dreadnought was a blistering white diamond bespeckled with amber lights. The afterburn of engines large as the Hope. It’s shadow was a dark thing circumscribed in the pale sphere of the moon that only slowly began to fade behind the hulking dreadnaught. In hours, that terror of the Sacred would descend into the volcanic remains of Jacob’s home. A fitting tomestone for humanity.

“Let me fight them, Sir.” Jacob said, “Let me go down fighting.”

He had to spit out the words.

“Allocate a fighter to pilot Z809.” A dozen officers heard the nonsensical command and not a single one opposed it. A flurry of orders were entered into the system with an extravagant flourish of keypresses and signatures. The death throes of a well-oiled machine. Jacob left the bridge.

“Jacob,” his… father called out to him just before he stepped past the automated double doors leading to the main body of the ship. It was taboo to refer to a pilot by anything other than their rank and identification. It was further taboo to hold up a soldier on route to the battlefield for merly one last regretful and proud gaze. “Give them hell son.” With one last salute, Jacob left the bridge and entered that furtive inferno of blinking lights that was their dying ship.

Jacob swam to the hangers. Dedicating energy to the gravity array at this stage of the fight would be meaningless. Humans surprisingly moved faster this way. He saw many tightlipped engineers zooming past him on their way to a hull breach that occurred two explosions ago but was only now deemed a priority.

He took hold of a jutting pipe and changed his momentum ninety degrees to enter the hanger. He found his ship prepped and waiting for him with a few minor additions. Normally his ship was shaped like a black crescent moon, but with the addition of two massive cylindrical boosters on both wings, and an honest to god cannon just underneath the canopy, it looked like a comedically heavy W.

“Jacob. Over here.” He jogged upstairs to a waving Double Eleven. He couldn’t help but smile as she handed him his flight suit. It was good to know she wasn’t dead yet. Double Eleven felt the same but hid it like the professional she was. Mostly.

“You’ll notice some new additions to your ship. Don’t worry about wasting fuel or ammo, you’ve been given a full allotment. Our last allotment really. Your guns have been replaced with my very own super shooter. It’ll take out the Sacred in one hit; so, shooting the bastards finally won’t be a waste of ammo.” Jacob nodded to her as he got in the tight cabin. He nearly jumped when Double Eleven grabbed his arm.

“Take care of my baby,” she said staring at the massive gun. “It’s humanity’s last shot. It’s my last shot. I don’t know if it will work, but it has to work. You have to make it work.” Jacob nodded as soldiers do, and entered the cabin.

He put on his breathing mask, vacuum-sealed his suit, skipped most of his safety checks, and then gave Double Eleven a thumbs up.

She smiled, returned the thumbs up, and exploded. The hanger was awashed in flames, and Jacob’s ship was carried away by the firey tide. He hit his head against the window but refused to pass out now of all times. That was a good reminder to put on a seatbelt.

While pressed against the window, a detached hand in the shape of a fist with an outstretched thumb left a bloody streak against the window. Jacob watched the half frozen thing drift lazily out of the hanger. It had just enough velocity to escape the gravity of the ship, the dreadnaught, and the moon below them. Double Elven would drift through the void of space for eternity.

Space was silent, so Jacob’s scream could not even be described as muffled. It was hushed. The sacred would not hear his pain, but they would feel it. Jacob slammed back the throttle, and his ship zoomed out of the hanger for the last time.

The Sacred flew gracefully, mockingly, always in a triangular formation. They didn’t need evasive maneuvers to fend off humanity’s weapons. Bullets were little more than accelerated shrapnel that dinged off their hulls like rain. Which made it so satisfying to see Double Eleven’s masterpiece explode six of them in a single shot.

The four Sacred spheres that remained had little time to react to the carcasses of the flighters ahead of them as they crashed into their fallen comrades like cannonballs. The devastation the photon cannon left in its wake nearly doubled Jacobs’s kill count in this skirmish. This would be a game-changer for humanity if the cost of manufacturing one weapon wasn’t the entire lifetime of one stubborn human.

“On your six.” Jacob listened to the voice, cut his forward engines, and then dove downwards. The sudden change in momentum lifted his stomach to his chest, but that nauseating feeling was better than dying. His flight AI had just saved him from the Sacred laser unleashed overhead.

“Thank you, Wingman.”

“Eighteen Sacred fighters remain, and you are the sole pilot left on the human side. This has been a great victory for humankind.”

“They destroyed the moon Wingman. I can see the core from here. This was no great victory”

“MISSING PARAMETERS! I am unable to calculate the value of the moon. The navy has destroyed one Dreadnaught class Sacred carrier at the cost of only one cruiser and one hundred and forty-nine fighters. Is this not a victory?”

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“No," Jacob said. "Not at all.” Jacob shot at a formation of six Sacred harassing a lagging group of escape pods. He missed his shot but dove through the formation like a stray comet. The Sacred were easily offended, and that minor flaw was a major pillar of humanity’s defense. The spheres left the escape pods be and hounded Jacob’s heel instead.

Jacob wiggled through stray debris, leading the Sacred to the wreckage of the Hope’s starboard engine. Humanity’s ships were nimble, but the Sacred had the mobility of bowling balls. In tight corridors filled with stray turbines, he had the advantage. Normally.

Jacob practically flung his controller to the right to get his ship to bank out of the way of a jutting pipe. The lead sphere behind him skewered itself on the wreckage, but that was too close. He had more speed now. That was the only reason he risked flying through the straight tube of the engine. With the lead Jacob had on them, he could react to their lasers before they fired, but all this speed came at the cost of extra weight. His maneuverability gear wasn’t calibrated for such a bulky ship.

Things ways of war had changed, but maybe that was to his advantage.

“Wingman. Initiate merge protocol.”

“Merging.”

Jacob gritted his teeth as his vision expanded. The canopy disappeared, and so did the interior of the ship until he was just a body floating in space. In his field of view, he saw the long corridor ahead of him, the fire tinged walls of the broken engine, and, eventually, the spheres behind him.

The AI’s were more than an assistant. They were a pilot’s ego made manifest. Surgically inserted into a child’s brain the moment they showed utility, the Wingmen served as life long companions and consciousness for a new breed of pilots. Only a child’s malleable mind could handle the flood of information that came with 360-degree vision and the omniscience of a god. At least, that’s how the science justified making children pilots and sending them to war.

Jacob didn’t care that in this state he was little more than a fleshy computer that could be shut down remotely at the first sign of rebellion. He only cared that he could shoot and fly at the same time. Jacob cut his forward boosters, rotated to face the five spears on his heel, and then mashed that button as fast he could.

Three thick, green beams fired out of the cannon one after the other. The barrel of the photon cannon dripped with molten steel after the shots, but the spheres were in much worse condition.

The first shot blased through the hull of the leading ship. The Sacred didn’t even know it was dead before a second shot barrelled through its back half and cleaved through the second and third ship in the formation. The Sacred paid for their arrogance today, as a line of hollow spears became little more than space debris.

“Twelve Sacred remaining,” said the voice in his head.

“Let’s make that zero.” Jacob exited the destroyed engine, and was immediately met with a shower of Sacred lasers.

Though slow to aim, the Sacred had pinpoint accuracy, and that was the only thing that saved Jacobs life. The spheres had aimed for the spot where a typical fighter would emerge. Not one a little bit faster. The lazers scrapped his hull, trapping him in a cone of death. ‘

When the brage ended, Jacob was left a ghost floating in space. Nothing seemed to work anymore, and his vision was tinted with red. Wingman seemed unable to filter the flashing red lights of his cabin, so Jacob could no longer pretend everything was okay and focus on the fight ahead.

Everything wasn’t okay. Jacob drifted closer to the enemy formation. Eleven spheres in a circle with a white pupil in the middle. All ships slowly began glowing red. Each Sacred warmed up their weapons for the final shot. The Sacred loved to marinate their prey in fear.

“Incoming message,” Wingman said. Jacob scrunched his brow. Who was still alive? Who still had time to send final words to a dead pilot?

Jacob ignored the postering spheres and slid a video that overlayed half of the cosmos.

It was Double Eleven. She stood majestically in that frozen frame with her helmet off. Her regulation defying hair flowed around her shoulders, and the stray strands hanging in mid air gave her the air of a midnight goddess. Jacob refrained from hitting the white triangle that would play her final message if only to have the privilege of dying first this time. A malicious desire to hear her voice one last time overrode his hesitation.

“Hey there, you,” Double Eleven said, stroking her hair back. Her smile had the gravity of a quasar and pulled him in close. “If you’re getting this message, then that means you took a boatload of damage and most of your systems are offline.” Double Eleven leaned forward, cupping a hand at the side of her mouth, “so much for being the Admiral's trump card, huh?”

Jacob let out a regulation defying chuckle, can’t deny that. “Regulation says disabled ships in the midst of battle should not, under any circumstances, be recovered. So you’re stuck out there Jacob.”

“Or you would be,” Double Eleven said, leaning back in her chair, “if I didn’t install a hyperdrive in your ship.”

What? Jacob thought. His eye twitched at the thought of the sheer stupidity of that statement. A hyperdrive on a fighter? Not only was that illegal, just thinking about the weight a hyperdrive would add to his ship. He was enraged. Double Eleven had just killed him. She had just, just-.

“It’s not fair. Is it?” Double Eleven said quietly. Her bright eyes dimmed as she fiddled with her fingers, debating the heresy she was about to spew. “We used to have these things called roller coasters. You’ll never believe this. I certainly didn’t. I still almost don’t. But, people would halt their duties to strap themselves in these metal carts that travelled at only a couple meters per second down these winding tracks. The tracks would loop crazily; they would go upside down and drop from obscene heights only to circle back to where they came from.

“There was no utility to roller coasters. Believe me, I searched. People rode them because, apparently, it was fun. Infact, the places that built these roller coasters were called amusement parks.”

“Could you imagine funds and materials for such a thing being allocated today?” Jacob could. Maybe. If they were repurposed as rudimentary training apparati for pilots. Before stealing Sacred technology, the fastest most humans could ever went was a few meters per second. A high speed rail could push that limit. There were always methods to the madness. There had to be.

“When I heard about roller coasters, I had the same thoughts you’re probably having about the hyperdrive I put in your ship. I thought, ‘why would you do such a fundamentally useless thing?” Jacob waited patiently for the answer. Double Eleven didn't feel like explaining herself.

“Maybe the Sacred can do worse things than kill us,” Double Eleven looked up towards a flickering fluorescent light and closed her eyes for half a moment. A strange method of prayer by all accounts. “There’s life out there in the universe right now. We know that now, unfortunately. You have one shot to find something better, something fun. You’ve always been one lucky devil.” Double Eleven smiled, tilting her head to the side and showing teeth. “Have some fun for me.” The message cut out.

Jacob was confronted with a black screen, and no outlet for his anger. Did Double Eleven really expect him to fling himself through the cosmos and hope for the best? Double Eleven was weird. She had a strange habit of naming things and practicing little bits of defiance while getting the job done, but this was going too far. There was a ninety-nine… No! That was low balling it. There was a one hundred percent chance that he’d end up in empty space and starve to death. Hope was dead. He’d take the warrior’s way out.

“Wingman. Is the hyperdrive ready?”

“Yes sir. Where would you like to go?”

“Aim for the Sacred in the center. The wake of the hyperdrive should take out the rest.”

“Sir?”

“You have your orders Wingman.”

“Yes Sir.”

Jacob retracted his vision, and sat back in his chair as a human. He wanted to feel this. Feel the Sacred squashed under the might of a human. He counted the beeping timer of the hyperdrive.

Three, two, one, silence.

Jacob peeked, and saw blue stars fly past him. Whole galaxies were reduced to nothing but blurred lines.

"Wingman?"

"Yes Sir?"

"What is this?"

"I'm sorry sir," the useless AI said, "I seemed to have missed."