Airman Jackson

I could feel the shudder of the Rabbit’s Foot as she got hit with another salvo from one of the thousands of enemy ships surrounding us. I nearly stumbled as I pulled my flight suit over my pajamas and sealed the helmet, feeling slight discomfort before the oxygen started flowing. After some fumbling with the seals on the gloves, I was finally rated for space, just in time too, as I walked into the hangar and saw my WSO already going through his portion of the preflight checklist and arming of our craft. As my eyes swept across the rest of the football sized hangar, I saw countless others doing the same thing. Some were already done, passing the time before we got the greenlight, doing things like praying, or speaking with their loved ones, most likely for the last time.

I took a moment to take it all in, after all this was the first time that humanity had ever clashed on this scale with the aliens that called this galaxy home, and were this any other kind of engagement I would be glad to hop into the cockpit of my fighter and teach these aliens what it means to mess with humanity…

But this was different. They had every advantage that they could ever hope for, and they were gunning after the largest concentration of Terran civilians outside of the Sol system. I could feel my hands shake. My wife and kids are on that ship. I couldn’t help but imagine their corpses being suspended in the vacuum of space, with no rescue ships in sight.

Ruminating that I was, I saw my WSO finally look up from his consoles and extend a hand to me. “About damn time you showed up! I thought I would have to fly this bird on my own!”

I smiled and grabbed his hand, trying to minimize the shaking in my hands. He pulled me swiftly up to the cockpit as I strapped myself in. “You know that I wouldn’t miss the chance to kill some uppity xenos!” I said as I quickly got through my preflight checklist, trying to keep my hands from shaking too much. “It’s all looking green over here, tower,” I said in the mike.

“Copy Airman, hot insertion into the AO in thirty seconds.”

I nodded and gave my WSO a thumbs up as the cacophony of the hangar suddenly ended, the air was evacuated from the massive chamber. If it wasn’t for my ragged breathing and the hum of the fighter’s engine, I would have thought that I had gone deaf. “Out of the frying pan,” I mumbled to myself.

“And into the fire,” my WSO replied before the hangar door opened, and we were treated to the first sight of this battle.

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It looked like a drone swarm, but instead of the tiny but still deadly drones I was accustomed to seeing, each member of the swarm was easily six times the size of our own fighter craft. While they tried to avoid the anti-air fire from the carrier, those guns were designed to hit targets significantly faster and smaller than they were. A small comfort. I started to do breathing exercises as we were launched out of the hangar, the inertia dampeners already feeling the strain of the G forces that we were subjecting it to. My breathing hitched as we went into the first turn, the lock on warning already blaring. If we make it out of here, it’ll be a miracle.

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Captain Kaushal

I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked at the holoprojection of the battlefield. The Rabbit’s foot was able to get all two-and-a-half thousand fighters out of her hangars and into the battle. The balance of power is still very much in their favor, but now we at least have a fighting chance. I turned to conference call I was in with the captains of the Double and Trouble. As if it were some weird twist of fate, they were both captained by identical twins that were impossible to tell apart if it weren’t for the ID tags that the system helpfully put on the two of them.

“All our fighters are out and making their way and are engaging the enemy. What’s the status of your ships?” I asked.

“Apart from most of the crew getting woken up in the middle of the night, we are running at peak performance,” one of them said. “Just point us at a problem and it’ll stop being one,” he boasted with a shrug.

The other smiled. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Line ‘em up and we’ll knock them down.”

I nodded, turning my attention back to the tactical overlay. I winced as I saw that in the minute that I wasn’t looking that the friendly count had dropped by over one hundred. I highlighted a battleship that was getting a little too close to the Rabbit’s Foot. “Intercept that one, and target their engines and reactor, intel from the Indomitable Crusade shows that the armor there isn’t as thick as it should be.”

Both nodded and turned to their respective crews, bellowing orders for the crew to fire up the railguns, along with the various weapon systems on their ships. A moment later, a hole appeared in the enemy ship, which was then quickly capitalized by the Double and Trouble following up with any weapon that they could think of to make the hole wider, until an explosion was seen and the gun turrets on the battleship stopped firing at us. I let go of the breath that I wasn’t aware I was holding onto. I silently made a tally before turning back to the twins. “One down, four hundred battleships to go!” I said with a half-smile. “If any ships get within this radius,” I said while highlighting a certain radius around the Rabbit’s Foot, “focus on them, otherwise the fighters aren’t going to have a place to rearm and refuel.

“Oh yeah, that’ll be really easy,” one of them said sarcastically before his professionalism reasserted itself. “We’ll try our best, but we can’t guarantee that nothing is going to break through.”

I nodded as I looked at the clock that the Admiral had made. Forty minutes. Just forty more minutes.