Scott's led the mechs far enough away that whatever algorithms govern their targeting don't seem to register John as a threat—but TB1's being overwhelmed, and there's only so much banking and rolling Scott can actually do to keep the bastards from getting purchase on his hull and shocking their way through his shields. And to make matters worse, John is rapidly making his approach; Scott can see the little yellow icon closing on his own, though his forward display is clustered and crowded with the bright red of hostile parties.
"What the hell are you going to do?" he demands of his brother, and alters the parameters of his display to render in a proper three dimensions, rather than the flat radial view he'd found useful when trying to determine the pattern by which the swarm was aligning itself. From out the back of the plane, John's gone high, and they're already pretty far up to begin with.
"Make an entrance," is the answer he gets, cryptic and blasé. And then the little yellow icon doubles—triples—its speed, secondary and tertiary afterburners flaring on, as John dives at a sharp angle, heading straight towards the swarm of drones.
"Maniac," Scott mutters, and rolls to the left, bringing his unwanted entourage along with him. Two, three seconds, and then he sees a streak of yellow go shooting past, and the targeting algorithms that had failed to parse John's existence before now get a sudden introduction. Conflicting information ripples through the swarm and Scott's sensors detect aerial impacts around him as the drones attempt to track two targets at once, suddenly working at cross purposes to one another. Scott sees the number of active hostiles on his screen diminish, feels the turbulence through his bird, the explosion of two colliding drones buffets the air outside. As quickly as it had been scrambled, the swarm reorganizes itself, and a handful of the machines break away, take off in pursuit of Scott's little brother.
John seems to have expected this, and his voice in Scott's ear is uncharacteristically giddy. "How many have I got?"
"Eight," Scott answers shortly, and punches the throttle, twisting his controls upwards as he does so, so that his afterburners blaze and flare across the swarm as they move to follow. He incinerates two of them, the rest of them scatter downward, and he covers two, three thousand meters of distance in the space of seconds, before he throttles back, brings TB1 arcing back around, because he can't leave his brother in the middle of this mess. From this angle, far below, he can see that little speck of yellow pursued by a phalanx of black, bright and dark against the sunset-gilded clouds below.
John seems blithely unconcerned by this fact. "How many have yougot?"
"Twelve, now."
"You've never been very good at sharing."
Scott grits his teeth. As an afterthought, he reaches up into his interface, pulls up a read on John's vitals. Heart rate, respiration, blood pressure—all elevated, spiking off the adrenaline rush and a flood of endorphins. Scott's pretty sure he's gonna grind his fillings loose as he feels his own pulse, hammering in his ears. He doesn't imagine that his own vitals look great, right at the moment, but in fairness, his brother is only compounding his stress levels, with interest. He's going to get himself killed.
"John, these things are discharging enough electrical current to knock me out of the sky, and you're barely shielded. First hit overloads your exosuit. Second fries the dampening on your blues. Therefore it'll be the third that kills you dead. So you're gonna get your ass up here and get aboard, and then we're both getting the hell out of dodge."
John doesn't answer. From high overhead, descending, Scott watches his brother slam on the exosuit equivalent of the brakes, retrothrusters firing as he throws himself backwards, right into the midst of the little phalanx of drones. Scott's still about a kilometer overhead as his heart skips a frantic beat—but when his sensors detect the pulse of electromagnetism, its centered on his brother. And then eight mechs tumble uselessly out of the sky, with a long, long fall to the surface of the sea below. Theta in action.
So that's that. John's even had the temerity to go and make it look effortless. Piece of cake. Easy as pie. A little voice in the back of Scott's brain, whispered and a little bit hopeful, supplies the words Twelve down, and twelve to go.
There's another hiss of the comm in his ear. And then there's a realvoice, the voice of someone Scott's most often supposed to listen to. "The only reason they're hitting you," John informs him, in an infuriatingly superior tone, "is because you declined the ability to hit them back."
Still dividing his attention between evading drone strikes and trying to stay within a reasonable range of his brother, Scott doesn't have an immediate answer to that.
It's possible he should stop feeling quite so self-satisfied about this whole situation, given the likelihood that pride is an a priori type of requirement for a fall, and falling is a particularly serious hazard right about now. There's probably also something to be considered about Icarus, although John's got titanium alloy and a custom polymer composite standing in for feathers and wax, to say nothing of the awareness that the sun is not the biggest threat out here. Greek mythology might be a little more worthy of John's attention if Icarus had ever needed to worry about murderously inclined insectoid mecha drones.
There aren't really many helpful mythological allegories for their current predicament. Aesop's fables rarely concerned the nuances of air-to-air combat.
Not that there's going to be any further air-to-air combat, given the way Scott snaps at him, as though he's done something worthy of a scolding. "Don't do that again."
"Well, I don't think it'll work twice."
"I mean it."
The fidelity on their comms is excellent, and Scott's radio receiver is right by his jaw. John's pretty sure he can hear him actively grinding his teeth.
"I'm fine, Scott," he reassures his brother, twisting in midair and drawing a bead on Thunderbird One, still being swarmed by drones. There's nothing to do but try to formulate a viable plan as he cautiously keeps his distance, a solid kilometer between him and his brother, and Scott still flying around like he's drunk at the wheel, rolling and banking and weaving to try and shake the (helpfully diminished) cloud of drones. "Could use somewhere stable to land, though, if I'm going to get another shot. What was the name of the thing where you toggle your flight controls remotely so you can land on top of TB1?"
"It's Protocol Alpha and I literally spent three hours teaching you how to do it right, but it doesn't matter, because the only protocol you need to worry about right now is Protocol Get-Your-Stupid-Ass-Out-of-the-Sky-Because-We're-Leaving."
"…I thought that was Delta?"
"Now, John."
Scott's voice has gotten terse, taut and anxious, in a way that John recognizes is because he perceives a threat to someone else's safety. His safety. His own flippancy is probably accountable to a higher than normal influx of adrenaline (and what might possibly be a minor head injury, he hasn't yet been stationary long enough to tell if the dizziness has really stopped), a fight or flight response that's rarely activated. In this specific case, fight and flight are so closely intermingled that he can't really do one without the other. Scott's right and he knows that Scott's right, because aside from one successful strike, mostly down to luck and the element of surprise, there's no point to making this a fight. Flight is definitely the preferred option, in this case. There's no rational reason for John to consider what it would take to knock the remaining twelve drones out of the sky.
He's only been thinking it, he hasn't actually said anything, but somehow Scott still manages to intervene in the middle of that train of thought. "We're getting out of here," he repeats, stern and certain. "You need to get back aboard."
"Okay, how?"
"I'm working on it. I'm also kinda busy right now, but maybe you didn't notice."
Backsass under duress is a failing shared by Scott and Gordon, but also a strong and worrying indicator of the degree to which they're starting to really lose control of the situation. Scott's got enough on his plate. How is usually supposed to be John's job, anyway.
It's a problem of speed and distance, like most of the problems they're called upon to solve. John can't recall the exosuit's top speed offhand, but it's orders of magnitude slower than Scott's, and he won't actually be able to get back aboard TB1 unless it's stationary anyway. TB1 can't stop in midair while being swarmed by mechs; John's not sure how well Scott's shields are holding up, but they can't hold much longer. In the slowly darkening skies overhead, he can definitely see blue white arcs of electricity sparking towards his brother's Thunderbird, as the drones attempt to fry his control systems and knock him out of the air. Kayo's still ten minutes out. John's got the means to disable the rest of the swarm, but it would require getting right up into their midst once more, and they're securely on his brother's tail.
It makes him wonder what the objective is, what the Mechanic hopes to achieve. Before now, he's only ever retaliated against their interference in his own endeavours. Given their encounters with him so far, a trap set specifically for a Thunderbird just doesn't seem like his style. John can't help but try and see the big picture, though the broad strokes of the situation are substantially less pressing than the fine, moment-to-moment details.
Still. There are clues in the context, and even as he rockets along, a thousand meters below and behind his brother, he's still trying to think his way through the problem, starting from the beginning. Aerial rescue, practically right in their backyard. Phantom pilot in medical distress, in a situation that would require evac. Cargo jet packed full of drones, programmed to swarm and overwhelm a Thunderbird. If Scott weren't aboard and actively piloting TB1, it's probable that it would've been downed by now, plummeting towards the sea. When John had dive bombed through the swarm, they'd been briefly disarrayed by the appearance of a second target. Whatever the purpose of the trap, it had been set for one of them, not two of them.
So, in theory, two of them together can beat it.
They just need to figure out how.