Legosi Main Pov
My map on the hud showed 500 metres to go until the ship depot, and with this in mind, I decided to radio in to the squad that was escorting the civilians a distance behind, and told them to advance to my position. In the meantime, I decided to have a chat with the handless Sangheili next to me.
"This will be where we part ways, but do not worry, your life debt will not go unpaid, because I kind of need you to tell me how to pilot a ship. After you've told me how to you can go back to wherever you came from. If we meet again I'd appreciate a heads up before you shoot at me or something".
And with a noncommittal wave I walked towards the ship depot, still on alert with my pistols on a swivel, and patched myself into the frequency that the Sangheili was on.
Legosi 3rd POV
Inside the ship depot, was a mess of trashed ships, rubble and small fires obscuring visuals noticeably, and it was grinding on Legosi's nerves, not knowing what was lying in wait around the next corner, because the depot wasn't exactly a large warehouse, there was an increased chance of a run in with covenant forces.
He sneaked through the depot, a pistol in one hand, a knife in the other, not that he'd really need the knife considering his pistol was basically a knife by itself.
He rounded a corner and found a relatively undamaged ship, scuff and soot marks marring its paintjob, but that was just aesthetic, as long as it was spaceworthy, even a trashcan would've done as far as Legosi cared.
It was helicopter like in appearance, except it had no helicopter blades, was about thrice as large, and had two giant engines running down both sides covered with wing like armour plates and a cluster of engines in the back. There were other, smaller, engines scattered all around the outside of the ship, for enhanced maneuverability and turning, he guessed. The cockpit itself was completely covered in metal, with large cameras built into the exterior being the only indicator of how anyone was supposed to see out of it.
It had no guns, being most likely a small passenger ship reinforced for rough space, or a cargo ship, reinforced for the more...human, side of space.
Luckily, there were no covenant around the area as he snuck over to the back of the craft, his armour informing him that the Spaceship was called an ASP-Explorer Mk3 and had the name Starhopper.
The rear entry hatch opened up and he was greeted to a space very similar to that of the back of a cargo plane. For some reason there was a crate of rubber dog shits in the back, with a sticker saying 'HONG KONG' in bright yellow on the back.
Huh, so this was essentially a cargo space plane flying rubber dog shits to Hong Kong then, no matter. He kicked the crate out of the cargo hold, slightly offended that someone was moulding rubber replicas of poo, especially since they seem to have been from his species.
Legosi 1st POV
As I sat down in the cockpit, I was internally thinking, WHAT THE FUCK HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FLY THIS THING THEREARESOMANYBUTTONSANDEVERYTHINGLOOKSSOCOMPLICATEDAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH, but externally I was calm and ready, and not about to start forgetting the information I was being fed by the sangheili on how to pilot the cargo ship.
For some reason all of the controls, once explained to me became sort of familiar, like I already knew them but had forgotten. Needless to say it gave me the heebijeebies. I flicked on the cloaking mechanism and piloted the ship carefully down the road to where all of the civilians were, as well as the soldiers protecting them.
I signalled them that I was about decloak and came in to land, albeit a little wobbly, which was thankfully masked by the uneven terrain.
All of the civilians, backed up by the troops, who stood guard around the general vicinity, loaded up into the back and made themselves comfortable whilst I closed the cargo hatch and went up into a vertical hover, spending a good second finding the switch that would retract the landing gear.
I then set us cruising at what the computer assisted takeoff module told me was the perfect way to escape the planet's gravity and atmosphere in a way that would tax the engine the least. It was smooth 'sailing', for all of 10 seconds, when the ship became visible to every other method of scanning apart from visual, seeing as we had departed from the cover of the ruined city. Shit. Fuckity fuck.
-MISSILES INCOMING, TAKE EVASIVE ACTIONS/DEPLOY CHAFF-*
NO SHIT WHICH ONE IS CHAFF THOUGH.
Oh, oh it was that button.
Okay so now that they know exactly where we are, the very smooth, predictable escape line was looking more like an ascent into certain death. Well then autopilot, it was nice having you take over for a while, whilst I tried to familiarise myself with the controls, but I guess it's time for me to put my impromptu studying to the test in the most radical way.
Taking the joystick I firmly planted my feet in the pedals that controlled yaw, seeing as pitch and roll was covered by the joystick, and yanked backwards, with my hand on the throttle, throttling it with my hand so tightly that it creaked, I accelerated, and went almost vertical immediately. Luckily the inertial dampeners installed into the ship tanked the blow of g's and then I twisted the joystick hard right, sending the ship into an unpredictable spiral pattern, so much so that I wasn't able to even see if we were still going up.
Unfortunately, a type 52 Phantom happened to be in the general vicinity, and decided to give chase. ~~How do I know that it's a type 52?~~.
The covenant ship followed us on our vertical trip upwards, and decided to start unloading on us with it's side mounted plasma cannons, as well as taking the occasional potshot at us with it's heavy plasma cannon, most shots ended up going very wide of us, by metres, or by centimetres, with the occasional hit lighting up the heat warning signals on my panel, telling me that an absurd amount of heat was being absorbed by the ship's external heatsink.
I decided to eject the current heatsink to avoid it melting a hole through the Hull. (if there is no such thing as external heatsink give me a break I'm not too well versed in halo lore, I'm just ripping shit out of Elite Dangerous cos that's where most of my knowledge on spaceships comes from)
I decided to turn and face the ship in the most unexpected manner, and completely stopped the ships forward momentum, whilst firing the thrusters associated to pitch on the right side, before gunning the engine again, resulting in a u turn that had us on an almost direct hit trajectory with the covenant ship. At the same time, I didn't quite know why I was doing any of this, as I fully expected myself to collapse into a heap in my chair and start blubbering as soon as I took off, let alone in the middle of ship to ship combat, in which my ship has no armaments, in fact the only thing that could even be considered not childproofed were... The sharp and heavily armoured 'wings' that provided really no purpose as there are thrusters that could've lifted the ship without them. I now see why.
I altered our trajectory again, this time we were headed straight towards them but at an angle, so that the wing lined up with the midsection of their ship. I pushed the engines to their limit to speed up, and rammed their ship, shearing through their hull like a knife through water(Yall thought I was gonna say butter lol), not exactly graceful or clean, but without resistance of much impress.
I could see parts of the ship falling apart, and small explosions littering the covenant ship as it hung in the air for a second, before gravity grasped at it and took firm hold of it again, tearing it out of the sky as it began to descend.
I quickly turned the ship around again, noting the various warnings about hull stress and integrity, and fair enough the ship, from what was visible on the external cameras looked like burnt popcorn, scorches and furrows littering the Hull, both from the dogfight and the shearing through of another ship.
I managed to clear most of those up, assigning the ship to clear up most of the damage by distributing the nonessential systems routines through redundant circuitry, but a few issues remained, where even the redundant systems had been damaged, one of those things being the slipspace drive trajectory predictor, which was pretty important. The good news, is that there was a spare module in storage, below the cargo deck with the living quarters.
The bad news, is that to do the repair, he had to reach in from the outside, repair some wiring and connect the new module.
We had just cleared atmosphere and were free of the effects of gravity. Cloaking mechanism was working and the engines turned off.
At least my boots can become magnetic.
