In the dark forest of her world, there were nevertheless a few things nearer to the campfire that NoCro could see clearly. One of these things was that she had to dump all her anti-shipping missiles immediately, invert her Ghost and point the nose in the other direction. She and her hundred-strong strike package performed this split-s maneuver at once, with each unit receiving the command from the Swarm razor. Despite losing her Hawkeye she still had eyes on Titan’s northern group, since she had a string of drones going all the way back to Cygnus like a trail of breadcrumbs. They had from 150 and 175 bandits with them, all fully armed for anti-air. Prism to her south had another 75 or so with the same mission profile. Bad odds.

However. Titan had split their total air forces to cover their amphibious landing and wasn’t sending everything they had at her. It probably seemed like a good idea to them, at the time. Two of them were covering the landings and two of them were coming after her—that had to be the case. One of them had to be Silver himself, just based on the man’s ego. Silver seemed to be at least mildly afraid of her, so that indicated he would have taken their second-best after Prism along for the ride. She knew who that was.

So she knew all the parties involved. If she had to guess at their dispositions, Silver had probably positioned himself on the right flank, since that was the side facing the rest of his forces. That meant she should focus on the left flank, since it was the greater threat. Messing with their heads was a free action, so she directed a few of her unarmed drones to the north into a roll to increase their radar cross sections. They might pick it up and wonder what she had out there, at their backs. Couldn’t hurt.

The Ghost didn’t have a canopy like a normal aircraft. The cockpit was in an armored citadel which was lined with a panorama of curved monitors. She flipped the monitors over to the visible spectrum. It was just after midnight local time inside the world of ACO and she was skimming over broken clouds. A half moon was painted on low in the sky. The asterism from which she drew her name, the Northern Cross, was not visible from this latitude at this time of year. She had to make do with its southern cousin.

Based on past events, what they were going to do was hit her with half of their guided missiles and save the other half for after the merge. There were two of them each using their own Swarm razor, not one Swarm controlling the entire assembly. That was a flaw. Unlike her and Prism, they’d never demonstrated an ability to be in the loop on the Swarm or for that matter any other system. The game’s implementation of various elements was decently complex, but in many areas it was tangibly stupid, outdated, and lacking in critical safety features that were probably present in reality. The more time one spent with a particular razor, the more of its quirks became obvious.

She divided up her forces into two distinct formations, east and west, and mirrored them as perfectly as possible. Her Ghost she kept right in the middle on this imaginary threat axis which bisected the enemy formation. Her heart rate had calmed down somewhat from earlier.

Slowly she moved the two groups she had split her forces further away from her, almost imperceptibly, and then she watched the enemy’s two formations. Each of them changed heading, ever so slightly, as it picked which one of her groups to attack first. Just before she came into range of their missiles, she sprang the trap on them and had both of her squadrons veer into each other. The whole assemblage of her drone fighters and F35Cs whipped by each other and in some cases just a few feet away from the Ghost. This was the coordinated work of a single swarm, under a single skilled authority.

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The enemy swarms gently vectored in for an attack on their original target. What she had done here was feed the pair of idiotic narrow-AIs controlling the enemy’s entire force identical but mirrored data. Filtered through a dumb and deterministic system like a razor, this produced mirrored outputs.

‘Mirrored outputs’ in this case meant that the enemy’s two air wings turned inward and started to gradually crash into each other along the center line defined by her Ghost. By the time the players involved managed to arrest this silly process of mutual destruction, each of them had lost about half of their force. NoCro’s subsequent cackling was squelched when a bloom of missiles emerged from the enemy’s stricken formation, which resulted in a bunch of rather scary alarms on her side. She straightened out her own squadrons, lit up her jammers, and started dumping chaff and mirrors and whatever else she had. From the approaching cloud it looked like they were sticking to their halfsies plan, in spite of losing half their attacking force. She decided to focus on evasion and deception, especially since the Ghost was insanely good at electronic countermeasures.

It was impossible to juke or deceive all of them. The Ghost was basically a giant brick. That was fine. All she had to do was feed them bad data. She did just that for the first one to arrive. Her eyes were far too slow to perceive it, but she felt like this whole space was part of her now. The Meteor missile exploded well ahead of her, along with many others her jamming systems were messing with. Between stealth and ECM and a modicum of good old fashioned maneuvering, she very nearly stuffed their entire barrage into the ocean as if it were trash. She lost about ten craft, mostly drones with low fuel that she held out as bait. She fired off a nice little telegram to Silver:

NC: this is the part where you throw the revolver at me.

She was panting again and her heart rate was climbing over 170. What she was after was coming. All of the decisions had been made.

—

Prism received a call from Silver, not too long after he engaged NoCro.

“Prism,” Silver said, “If you don’t come through here, you can kiss Europa goodbye.”

“You deceived me!” Prism said, “Now you want me to turn around and stab someone else in the back? Where does this end?”

“This is the brass ring. You need to grow up right now and think about what’s important to you. That girl NoCro means nothing to you, and none of this means anything to her.”

Silver was wrong on both counts, really. There was something more important, though, even than that.

“I gave her my word.” Prism said.

“The only way you get your happily ever after is through me. Don’t forget that.” Silver said, “Do it now.”

Prism clenched his fists and set his teeth. Yes, anything for her. Even his own honor.

“…alright.” he said, and directed his drone fighters to accelerate.