Ready Ten Years Ago
SF Condottiere
Udeav System Slipstream
Colonial Space
0350 Ship Time
"Eight, up."
"Damn right you are," Jana muttered as she manually focusing her Arwing's quantum entangle scans to the front. She was not going to be caught off-guard.
Jana's visor and windscreen HUD flooded her with information overload as the combination of long range scans and alerts piled in. She winced, mentally castigating herself for not copying over her simulator's minimalist preferences beforehand. It wasn't like her to be this unprepared.
Despite the surprise, she hoped it would be a fight; a christening of sorts. Though, the professional in her kept her ego restrained enough to treat this somewhat bythe books. There was safety in numbers, and they were a flight of three.
"Jimmy, keep on my steerpoint; Zero-Three-Four, deflection six-five."
She manually locked her targeting, and ROB anticipated her next move by sending it to the flight. An advisory projected itself into her vision, it tracked Jana's eye's around the cockpit.
/UNK Contact - 9231 KM - 034-065\\
"Gotcha'," he replied. "Seeing over nine-thousand K-M?"
"Checkrog. Six, Just do you," Jana instructed Akach, knowing she'd wordlessly taken her left wing by instinct.
The three Arwings fired through the cylindrical time and space bubble in a crescent blur of silver and blue. Jana's Mark-Three led the pack; an unmistakable monobloc silver wedge with stark features. She was closely followed by Akach and James in their second mark variants.
Space dynamics had returned to the original prototype lines for the Mark Three; and a triangular hull design with two polygonal G-Diffusers in a rich coat of sapphire blue paint. It was new from wingtip to wingtip; not a single component unaltered. While the second mark variants were still relevant; Slippy had spent over a decade drafting up various designs for the third revision of the storied craft.
Toad's genius resulted in the birth of another space-superiority apex predator. A fighter withA a G-Negation range so powerful, Jana could practically crank out of slipspace without incurring any physics-based punishment harsher than what she felt during a normal atmo-reentry. On the inverse scale, at sub-slip speeds, it was about as fast as the mark-two's later iterations; but with double the weapons payload and none of the heatsink issues.
How did Dripp put it? 'You could gas her up yesterday and shoot her all week.'
Jana's mark-three dispensed with the wing root blasters. Unlike her forefathers, Jana considered them wasteful. She preferred the simplicity of a single gimbal mounted weapon mounted ventrally. The gold-lined, eight-centimeter bore laser cannon was matched to her eye movement, could charge-shot and had less energy draw than the three laser weapons on the marks one and two had. Jana, preferred energy weapons anyway. It wasn't a popular sentiment, but she'd refused to rely on the fad-like re-emergence of ballistic weapons to win a fight; no matter how much shield-bypass they were capable of.
Tradition was also broken by omission of the nova-class bombs; which Jana kept in reserve for the older Arwing's in her menagerie. Jana's launch tubes were stuffed with ten QES-2 interceptors, long-range anti-fighter missiles; not that she ever used them much. She preferred actionable information from her two minerva drones.
Jana's weapon pips suddenly un-slaved off the display, tracking her dominant eye's arch from the right side of her vessel to the left. ROB did the rest, auto charging the first shot in reserve and toggling the mechanical safety. Jana didn't have to think about it, she just needed to pull the trigger when she was ready.
"Five minutes to intercept," ROB's digitized voice carried over the net.
"Okay, perk up, we're looking at an incursion on our slipspace bubble," Jana started anew, breathing completely unaffected by pre-combat stress. She enabled video broadcast; mostly for Jimmy's comfort. In his cockpit he'd just see her helmet bobbing up and down in her seat, but she figured that was better than nothing.
Each canopy displayed a full-color hologram of the condottiere in slipspace; it was a live 'image' that combined all the sensory data collected by ROB. The Condo' got smaller as the surrounding space-time disruption backed into view. The pilot's faces appeared in the lower left of each canopy for the hasty in-flight briefing.
"Wake profile?" Akach asked calmly, fiddling further with her heads-up-display on camera. This was routine to her.
"No more than twenty meters dilation," Vukašin answered. A green and brown horned lizard from Jana's former ISS interceptor crew. The middle aged Venomian had seen nonstop combat since the Aparoid invasion and Jana suspected earlier than that based on his array of warparty tattoos.
"That's not huge," Poppy's disembodied voice said. "Rogue asteroid or comet is about the same size for a bubble this width."
She was back on the bridge assisting Vukasîn with managing the flight; her skills in applied astrophysics were useful. And she had a good head on her shoulder. A Hare in her proper place.
"Vuka, show Pops to her station," Jana commanded over the net.
"Will do, Sef ," the video feed buzzed.
The holographic image in their cockpits also showed a fuzzy 'wave' in the space off the Condo's twelve o'clock; about eleven thousand kilometers past the lens, or 'front' of the space-time rift.
"Twenty meters. One medium size or two small fighters," Akach assessed.
"Someone looking to save on fuel?" Poppy enquired.
Cheapskates or often more malicious actors often 'hitchhiked' in the space-time warp fields generated by larger craft in slipspace. It saved these unsavory parasites on fuel cells at the expense of a higher energy draw on the host ship. It could also cause field stability issues; something that kept most spacers up at night.
"To Udaev?" Akach responded. "No."
Jana poked the wavy image with her index finger, ten thousand hours of lived experience informing her next moves.
"Agree," the flight lead declared. "Anomalous. Our bubble's too small, they'd wait for the occasional freighters. This is something more p urposeful. A scout."
"Pirates?" James asked nervously.
Jana grinned. Wouldn't that be fun?
Her excitement was only inhibited by a cursory look at James. She clearly sensed some apprehension. His frightened demeanor was worrying enough, but his complete lack of a sealed spacesuit made her skin crawl underneath her fur. Combat in his trackies? Some things never change.
"Not for us to care about."
"Intercept in two ." Jana, turned to the image of the youngest member of the crew, who had joined Vuka on the bridge. "Poppy, Vukašin. Sensor duty. We have a small window to push them out, don't blink." she instructed, index finger pointing at the young Hare's grinning face.
The flight had barely set their course for intercept before Jana opened a private channel to her twin. Jana unsealed her helmet and rested it down on her lap by one of its 'ears'. She hoped being face to face would help him.
The private channel indicated its openness with a gentle trio of bongs.
"You good?" Jana asked, genuine concern in her voice.
Of course not. He's rusty. She recognized. He needs more Sim time. If I lie, he'll think I'm reckless. If I tell the truth, his ego will make him a risk.
"Just been awhile is all," James admitted, saying less. His confident-appearing facial features were masking an innocent, primal fear in his eyes Jana forgot was possible to possess.
Jana made sure to look through the camera. Just like when they were kids, she could inspire him to do anything; often to his detriment.
Less is more.
"Nonsense," she said cheerily, a half-cocked grin.
She slapped her helmet back on, there was a hiss as it sealed shut. The illuminated full face visor made it easy to see the smirk on her face.
"You were ready ten years ago, Jimmy"
I've used that one before, She thought laughing to herself. The train hopping incident in Ora Bay.
/UNK Contact - 2673 KM - 035-067\\
Meanwhile, in James' cockpit, threat intelligence displays began lighting up like yellow and red fireworks. He'd only seen a real contact alert a couple of times, and he'd never fired a shot in anger.
"Okay, Jimmy, look alive," Jana's voice rang through his head. Her image of her appeared on the instrument panel indicating the new steerpoint.
He didn't alter his flight path; but with a toggle on his right multimode panel, he activated the augmented views on his ship; his entire cockpit became transparent to his eyes, with the exception of the flight controls before him. A mix of hologram and high-refresh camera feeds. He wasn't ready to fly-by-feeling yet, but he wanted maximum visibility.
"I see it," James groaned, noting the yellow arrow pointing at the direction of the approaching ship. "He's at my front upper right. Oh-three-four, Oh-six-four."
"Conn, this is One." Jana noted, using her callsign 'one'. "Going hot."
"Recce up?" Vuka confirmed from the bridge.
"Minerva on the way," Jana responded as she depressed her control stick's trigger. Her mark-three rolled left in the vacuum as the drone released from its hardpoint. There would be a momentary shudder inside her cockpit as the pilotless-drone wingman detached from the G-diffuser pylon. It propelled itself through the vacuum at an astonishing pace, a bright orange streak in its wake.
"Minerva going cold," ROB chimed over the net. Confirming the drone's arm and launch sequence had been successful. The pulse engine fizzled out, letting unlimited inertia do the rest of the work in the localized space.
"Mark, one minute out," Jana updated the group.
"Roger, one minute," Akach confirmed from her cockpit.
'Minerva' was Slippy's new sweetheart. An unarmed, stealthy wingman drone that provided a few hundred kilometers early warning and targeting aids to the Arwings.
Minerva suppressed quantum EntangleScans and LIDAR with a fluctuating vibratic quark field. It wasn't perfect but the little drones could get within a kilometer of a target before they were able to really notice anomalies. Atmospheric RADAR evasion was also trivial, its shape and paint absorbed the rays. SONAR was the only way to really test it, and in space that wasn't an option outside of the occasional oort clouds.
Onboard, the Minerva was just cameras and sensors, but that was enough to make room for additional fuel for its 'ascent' phase. Once launched it could reach a blistering thirty-five thousand KPH before it switched over to a cold-burn secondary to avoid thermal detection. Dogfights in this era were usually decided by who scanned and locked the other first; and Slippy guaranteed Minerva would be the first to lock.
The sixty seconds felt like an eternity to James; pre-combat adrenaline had a funny way of doing that. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. He thought, his restless leg and foot tapping a drum solo into the cockpit floor.
"Mark, minerva in range," Akach noted.
/UNK Contact - 2450 KM - 034-064\\
Meanwhile in Jana's cockpit, the situation was a bit more muscle-memory.
" Eureka on Minerva."
A holodisplay of the scan results projected itself onto Jana's windscreen overlay, she wiped it upward to cast onto her eyepiece. Holodisplays always cut off text the wrong way. She had learned to keep her eyes on target, never on her instruments.
"Go for scan," She said.
She blinked. The readout from Minerva was interesting to say the least.
"Wolfen IIM. Nasty business," Jana narrated to the flight.
The Wolfen IIM was a 'modernized' variant of an old wartime baddy; a classic 'Arwing killer'. The classic Wolfen II was reportedly flown by the Star Wolf team during Venom's final desperate gasps of the Lylat Wars; if only briefly before being destroyed by her father. Bucking the typical trend of variants, the II M was actually far less capable than the original II version, which was so mentally overwhelming to fly that it was known to require pilot augmentation.
All this being said, the IIM in the right hands, with the proper weapons loadout, was still a lethal animal. It was a match for speed and armament. And who knows what else they've done to it.
And she's a cornered animal now.
"Only one, though," James commented.
Minerva's feed went dead suddenly. It should have adjusted course back to the Condottiere by now.
"What's she doing out here, you think?" Poppy asked the group. A rhetorical question, she was not expecting the results to be peaceful.
"Testing us," Akach surmised.
"Serial confirms late Venom production. Pretty old," Tadd Toad's groggy projection announced. He wiped his eyes.
"She's gracefully aged," Jana teased. Akach chuckled. An inside joke among them.
"Ladies; what exactly, the fuck , is going on?" Jimmy questioned.
Not now Jimmy. Just remember what dad taught you.
"Intercept in twenty," ROB's voice alerted.
"Seconds?" Jimmy asked, stupidly. For fucks sake, Jimmy.
"Keep up, don't do anything stupid," She responded, giving her brother the time to ruminate on the question.
/WII-M - 433 KM - 030-085\\
"Closing," Akach alerted. "We're in range. Minerva has a hard lock. One, want to hail?"
With the flip of a switch, Jana enabled allscan for her comms. Every frequency in this bubble would pick it up. Even a primitive walkie-talkie.
"Unidentified Wolfen, as bored as we are, there's not enough room in this slipspace stream for a stowaway," Jana said cooley. "Reverse your course immediately or we will engage."
There was no response.
Jana had a feeling the silence was intentional. There would be no peaceful resolution this morning. She keyed in again; "Wolfen; Last chance to reconsider."
With a similar silence filling the void, Jana flipped her weapons off safe; and not a moment too soon.
"Boss, WEZ is being jammed!" Akach alerted.
"Minerva feed lost," ROB added as a cacophony of false and true alerts surrounded them.
"Right then. Make sure yours are on," Jana replied. Jana barely flicked her own jammers on before the next series of alerts came through.
/WII-M - 82 KM - 019-065\\
There were flashes and beeps on James' own HUD that he recognized from his previous life as a lock warning. Drawing the shorter stick, his Mark-Two's jammers were weaker and the resulting chaos funneled toward him.
"Soft lock on eight!" Akach announced over the net.
The years of years of latent reflex training uncoiled immediately as James rolled right and down; completing a long loop. While 'up' and 'down' were meaningless in the space fight, his maneuver allowed him to dodge what looked like a storm of fire and lightning bolts. A light-blue barrage of plasma.
"Hard lock on eight!" Tadd said, suddenly more alert.
Eight is me! Somewhere in the void, someone was trying to kill him.
"Eight, defending!"
The Wolfen zipped past them, completing their merge and continuing to discharge a steady stream of electrons toward him as it passed. Jame's didn't make it easy, yanking the solid aluminum sticks back and jinking harshly the whole way.
As the adversaries began their spiral to the 'bottom' of the slip bubble, James could barely make out a uniquely misshapen 'double-hull' variant of the Wolfen. What he could make out clearly was that the pilot was rapidly trying to pull into his circle!
The closer he gets, the less others can help you!
It wasn't a proper Wolfen; at least not the image they'd expected. It was dark gray, with only one complete fuselage module as opposed to the typical symmetrical double-deck design. It sported yellow G-diffuser pylons and James was able to spot a large gun mounted ventrally, as he passed head-on. Something massive on a gimbal mou nt.
Turn in. Fucking turn IN.
Giving up the rate-fight, the Wolfen broke through the lines and performed an inverted reversal. Its pilot pursued James; but throttled too aggressively to catch up. Without kinetic energy bleed off or limitations on physics to deal with, this pilot was out to draw close-quarters blood.
It was also a potentially fatal mistake.
James had flown himself a well-designed wheel, the opposite of what he'd done earlier; causing the Wolfen to overshoot him and fall into Akach's arc.
"Six, nose on."
James watched as Akach slid into their dual-circle, making this fight two-on-one. She'd been watching; waiting for her moment.
The Wolfen, to its credit, saw her coming and mitigated what could have been a clean, instant kill. It lurched right, utilizing artificial 'rudder' control applied through explosively compressed plasma. The resulting cloud scorched Akach's shields as she flew through. No one had launched missiles or a homing shot yet, another compliment to the Wolfen's knife-fighting ability.
Nevertheless, with three-versus-one advantage, Akach was able to put three laser bolts onto the Wolfen's rear shields, nearly buckling them!
The Wolfen spun off, using its superior speed to create distance.
It looked too good to be true, and thus was. Jana fired a missile and two homing shots at the craft as it retreated; which promptly avoided them with a decoy module, which took the brunt of impact.
"That's not a Wolfen," James said over the net he could scarcely push out the words over the racing of his heart.
"Acknowledged, Eight, not Wolfen. That's something else entirely," Akach confirmed, her image laden with the cold, evaluating energy of a huntress on the prowl.
"It's custom," Jana said after a lengthy pause, "Black rose model."
"Ya'll have bigger problems!" Poppy yelled over the channel.
"What?" James asked.
"Stellar object closing on our bearing, we gotta' move!" She replied.
"Planetoid on path. Conn going right, three mils off current heading!" Vukašin stated, as Rob committed resources to the vessel's shift automatically. "Stand-by for gravimetric shifts!"
The Condottiere shifted to avoid the distant impact. At its current angling pace, it needed a minute to change its heading. The fighter's were not so lucky, and needed more time for their smaller slip drives to adjust; being in combat didn't help.
"Break, break all! Just shut the hell up and correct it!" Dripp, screamed facelessly over the channel. He knew as well as Jana that there was no room for errors here.
Capitalizing on the discord, the deadly 'Rose' chose a new target: Jana's Mark-Three.
The angular craft closed one-hundred kilometers in a few seconds, sticking to the line's famous strategy of hit and run 'jousting'.
Jana obliged its challenge, a game of chicken between two killers and a planetoid.
Jana's Arwing approached the rose directly, if only to give her own wing time to recommit and make adjustments. She maximized thrust, redlining the Arwing forward at her prey. They were in engagement range in under five seconds.
James watches neither hesitated and both fired. Jana's shots hit twice on the port G-diffuser; but they were soaked up by the remaining shielding. In exchange, the Black Rose hit Jana with the tail end of a plasma burst; taking a much larger fraction of her own shielding capacity with it.
/WII-M - 130M - 002-322\\
Jana was now tangled in a two-fighter furball as her team worked to avoid collision.
"Sixty-seconds Jana! You need to move!"
Jana, an unstoppable force, depressed her stick nose down while temporarily disengaging her G-diffusers. Her retro thrusters assisted as she completed an inverted ninety-degree rotation right before reengaging fill thrust. As she accelerated to pursue, her body briefly pulled six-G's of its self-imposed gravity before the dampening canceled it out. For her it was easier than riding a bike.
Haven't played against the rose in awhile, Jana thought, appreciating the pressure she was under with a smirk. She suspected a particular pilot; and hoped they weren't serious about escalating things further.
The two fighters committed to another pass. This time both pilots defended a little more aggressively. Jana corkscrewed, using her rudder pedals and superior maneuvering to keep the Wolfen off her tail. The Rose, not missing a beat, anticipated this and applied maximum strafing with her charge. Assisted by thousands of kilos of thrust from her compressed air maneuvering thrusters. The Rose orbited just out of Jana's gimballed crosshair pips.
The Rose imitated her flat spin; confirming Jana's suspicions. Jana could have homed a charge shot on target, but she settled on dumb firing lasers instead. No effect, they barely lanced her foe's wingtips.
"Sis!" Jimmy screamed over the net.
*PROXIMITY WARNING*\\
Jana's heart bracedbefore she spoke. "ROB, calculate it,"
"Master Jana, I advise-"
"-Fuck your advice, bolts!" Jana commanded, "You know what I want!"
They merged and passed each other again as James and Akach flanked outward through safe slipspace.
Jana steered toward the proximity warning as it and her target entered into view.
An cerulean asteroid, at least one-thousand kilometers wide. It's ancient, knotty masses threatening a fate worse than disintegration. The Black Rose along with the abyssal rock, hurtled directly towards Jana like a harbinger of the apocalypse.
Jana lined up as if to fire a shot as the shifts in gravity her seat pulled her against her restraints. The fiber's broke capillaries and blood vessels under her sand-coloured fur.
Instead of pulling the trigger, she just disengaged her slip drive.
And then she and her Arwing disappeared.
/WII-M - 1212 KM - 167-120\\
"The Dot's slowing down!" Poppy yelled.
"Where's Jana?" James panicked.
"This is expected, all parameters normal," ROB confirmed. "Continue mission."
The Condottiere's hull passed clear of the Asteroid's gravity well, taking the smaller craft with it. Jana's Arwing was nowhere to be seen.
"She's fine. Stay focused." Falco added calmly.
My turn.
Sixty seconds post-merge, James' palms felt like solid masses, and his feet felt cold and heavy. Combat stress; he recognized distantly. He was a combat veteran now, if he lived long enough.
His breathing was staggered. His lungs barely kept themselves inflated with the light, rapid breaths that accompanied deadly situations. James managed it; His composure kept stable by both his father's training and his inherited aptitude.
The Wolfen pilot was better than him. He knew it. They all knew it. James knew he was lucky to have survived that first tangle. But, there was no time to be afraid or worried for his sister.
The Arwing was a better dogfighter in vacuum and atmosphere. It could outrate a Wolfen pretty quickly, but only if the opposing pilot didn't capitalize on the Wolfen's superior speed.
"Okay, guess we are it, then," James said, trying to take control.
"Aki, stay clear, she's mean up close," The wise old bird advised.
"Eight, Six. Acknowledged," Akach responded flatly.
James flew the opposite direction as Akach, hoping to drag out their would-be-assailant.
"We gotta' stay keep pulling that bastard away from each other. We can outrun it!" James yelled.
"Not with a capital ship-grade particle cannon on a gimbal mount you can't," Tadd said, not aware his helpful problem solving comments were having the opposite effect on James.
"Right. You can't out-rate a gimbal," James confirmed, bits of his training trickling back into mind. The Wolfen is less maneuverable, but those flexible gimbal mounts could adjust for that by aiming ahead of the ship's nose.
"Stop thinking defensive, kid!" Falco advised harshly, "it's just a boxing match to the back of the slip. Use your longer range weapons to splash him."
James knew Akach wanted to get up close. But clearly the Rose wasn't piloted by the average pirate.
"Aki," the wizened bird singled out. "I know you like to fight with knives, but she's going to have to turn around at some point. Not a lot of room to burn in slip. She wants you. I need you to play bait."
"I trust you, Falco," The cheetah replied, "Taking right by way of 170-170."
The shipboard VI mapped the tour Akach described on her map and on James' canopy display.
"James. Follow Six, missiles only. Back her up at range. Fly like you're scared"
James swallowed the lump in his throat and regrouped. He didn't have to pretend to be scared. He felt his heart sink as he did what he was told. realizing he'd lost visual.
His adapted VI, Gil, recognized his frantic eye movement and placed a red bead back on his target, brackets forming around the HUD.
The delay wasn't good for James; and the Rose had pressed the advantage. Refusing to take Akach as bait, it's pilot weaving an elliptical arc toward the shaking vulpes. The Wolfen then banked away suddenly in a gambit only James could have fallen for.
He pursued. Pressing down on his sticks, he engaged full thrust to catch his prey. The Wolfen wasn't phased, and continued its leisurely pace. James locked and fired two missiles in under six-hundred meters. Aki had one out on it as well. One of James missiles was fired too late, aborting its flight as it was in the minimum arm range; but nevertheless two missiles bore down on the Rose.
The Rose spun flat! Forcing James to overshoot, and putting Akach directly in its path. James' missile failed to track and zipped past the Wolfen at the last second, detonating harmlessly a few hundred meters away. The Rose, with a massive display of force, discharged its plasma cannon; melting Akach's incoming missile into inert slag and forcing her to break contact.
Somehow, the wily bastard had put two Arwings on the defensive!
James panicked, pressing his hand against the canopy as he spun about wildly trying to track his target; his frightful breathing fogging some of the transparent aluminum 'glass' surfaces.
However; his target's luck didn't last for long. Before he could even think about defending against certain death, the Wolfen broke, exposing its flank to interception. It had found a new target.
"Enough foreplay, Liana!" Jana's voice trumpeted.
James' sensors came alive with blue notifications: Jana was back . Her Arwing had dropped and reentered slipspace, something only it could do!
There was a hiss as a foreign signal imposed itself on their communications channel.
"An asteroid as a slingshot? Be still my beating heart," a stranger's voice spoke.
She had a graceful Katinian accent that danced a knife's edge between elegance and menace.
"Been a long time, McCloud. The rumors went quiet. So quiet I thought you might actually be dead this time."
She enabled broadcast. A panther appeared on-screen, coated so black she looked purple. Hair braided tightly and piercing yellow eyes. She wore a crimson-red flight suit; the same hue and make as Jana's.
"I can make the silence much more permanent for you, Liana," Jana spoke over the radio.
So our guest was known , James thought, keeping his soft-lock on the Rose open. It certainly explained Jana's uncharacteristic reticence to engage, she wasn't known for her restraint.
"You know what I do to people who threaten my family," Jana warned.
Liana rolled her eyes.
"Relax, girl ," she said.
Inevitably, as James predicted, Jana didn't.
"James, Akash. Keep her under fire from your arcs. You sneak in when you have a chance. Don't be a hero or you'll get zapped again."
Jana powered forward, capitalizing on the widening opening that Liana had deliberately created. Her sparkling-new mark-three much faster than Liana had anticipated.
Both pilots danced; toggling their G-Diffusers and forcing overshoots. At one point Jana managed to place a few shots on the Rose's hull-shielding. If they'd been ballistic Liana would have been a cold corpse already.
Doing as they were told; James and Akach flew a long route of their own.
"Eighty-klicks," Akach noted privately to James, the distance to their new merge point.
With a few seconds to go before intercept, James selected a feed option linking to the long loitering minerva. He could see Jana and Liana furiously pushing their machines to the max. She kept Liana busy enough for James to acquire Liana's three o'clock on his HUD at about ten kilometers range.
"I have a shot," James notified. Akach didn't feel it necessary to update such frivolous information.
James fired two bolts at her. Two shining blue streaks of one-hundred-ninety kilowatt beams of death. they missed wide as Liana pulled a similar flat spin to Jana. A maneuver the two nemesis had apparently learned from each other.
James overshot again.
His adversary took his six o'clock, taking the initiative to retaliate with some bolts of her own. James had depressed his stick to avoid taking fire, but was blinded as Liana's plasma bolts ripped over head, barely nicking his rear shields. They missed; but dropped his shields to eighty percent. She was playing with him again.
James was over it all. He recklessly yanked on his yoke hard and left while disabling his g-diffusers for a split second. He capitalized on the unlimited inertia of space to keep his speed relative to the Rose as he retro-thrusted his way to a slower speed as they entered a shallow spin.
He rolled a half circle; feeling six, maybe seven, gravs flatten him to his seat. But it worked!
The Rose fought for nose-on in the resulting tangle, but James' maneuver put him at such an advantageous position that not even the Wolfen's flexible gimbal mount could track James' Mark-Two. It was a fool's errand for her to even try, James simply spun around the craft, limited only by the thrust available to his dorsal maneuvering thrusters.
He studied the angular vessel as they entered tango. A painted rose on the topmost section of the hull; just underneath the cockpit. Its two-decade's old hull carried scorch marks patched probably too-numerous times to count. As they spun about, she switched her circle; the other side of her vessel displaying kill scores, dozens of them, carved into the plating. A ship with a story, James thought, barely able to make out the cat in the pilot's seat. I wonder what hers is?
"Liana cita ," Jana condescended over the net. "You've been practicing, I see. Just give it a rest and piss off. You're scaring the new guy."
Refreshingly, their guest obliged.
James blinked and exhaled; relieving him of a crushing weight. He wouldn't have to kill today; and he likely wasn't going to be killed. Without noticing, he had loosened his death grip on his control sticks.
The much-modified Wolfen disengaged. James kept himself ready for a doublecross, but unlocked the imposing fighter from his crosshair pips. His trigger finger shook as he took it off the stick. Liana's face lit up onscreen; clearly pleased with herself.
"I'm just playing with you, girl," she teased, her bright set of teeth contrasting sharply against her darkened fur, "If I wanted him dead I would have done it already."
"Rubbish," Jana scoffed. "I had you and your drones quiet-locked at two-thousand K-M."
"Expensive toys," Liana retorted.
"So this is what he' s got you doing? Misdemeanor harassment? It's not going to work. This is a new low. Even for you, Liana," Jana savaged.
Liana wasn't rattled by any of Jana's barbs.
"Anders is in the field," The cat said cautiously, "I saw your clearance come through the gate registry. Just wanted to see if you were still among the living."
"Recce by booty-call?" Jana replied with more than a little sultry undertones. "Sounds like someone's missed me."
Someone else laughed on the net; James wasn't sure who. Maybe Falco ?
"Off the table," Liana rejected.
Liana didn't sound amused anymore. She flew toward an exit in slip space, her first indication of peaceful intent this evening. As always, it was either at the extreme front or end of the larger ship's lense-distortion. In the Black Rose's case; the front of the Condottiere. She was returning to Udeav.
"I figured you'd moved on by now," Jana said, furiously. "But you always were the sentimental type, weren't you?"
Liana chortled, and her comms channel picked it up. James was sure the amusement contained some rage; but the image in the small windows on James' HUD showed something a bit more intimate. The panther peered down at her control panel for a second, a small smile quivering into view for a second before she looked toward the windscreen again. James, who considered himself an empath, recognized it as a sign of reminiscent feelings.
This was all a very new experience for James, who'd always stayed clear from the romantic part of Jana's life. Twenty-six years , and Jana'd never had a relationship she felt necessary to report to her family. Not even a peep. Any question was met with grunts or the off-color sarcasm. It wasn't a space she welcomed anyone and James figured she'd been mostly a conquest-seeking gal. Jana was a fighter, and her targets never lasted long; why would love be any different for her?
"Any thoughts on my previous offer?" Jana asked. "You can even bring that abomination of a fighter of yours if we can fit it in the racks. Consider this a pass for the interview process."
"Also off the table, McCloud," The panthress said firmly, though James thought he heard tinges of regret. "Not anymore. Not after what you-"
"-I did only what I had to." Jana interrupted, jaw clenched. Her green irises locked in electric hatred. " You still have a choice. You can still move on. I wasn't that lucky.
Liana froze. "Anders would kill me."
There's that goddamn name again, James thought.
"He's going to, Liana." Jana chastised "You're just an operating cost to him!"
Silence. Liana's visible rage grew, and then she spoke. "You would know best, wouldn't you? Who do you think has the higher body count? "
A longer, tenser silence filled the void.
"I won't apologize for surviving, Liana."
"If that is what you choose to call it. 'Surviving'," the cat pantomimed.
"I don't give a shit what you call it, errand girl!" Jana screamed, "When your back's against the wall like mine was, then you can judge me. Not before."
The outburst was stunning. Jana wasn't herself. It was so beyond expectation that even their uninvited guest was silenced.
"Run along now," Jana instructed coldly. "When you tell Anders I'm back, make sure he knows I'm just waiting ."
Liana's avatar wasn't having fun anymore; and neither was James. His sister's palpable pain was so strong he could feel it through his own canopy.
"Please be careful, Jana," Liana begged, her previous snarkiness morphing into genuine concern. Warmth, even.
"Are we killing her?" Akach interrupted ruthlessly. "We can make it quick. I just need a yes or no, boss."
"No," Jana declared, frustrated but with no hesitation. She shook her head an extra beat, snapping herself out of her mood .
"Let her go," she said, breaking her Arwing's coverage on the modified Wolfen. James and Akach followed, matching her speed and steerpoint.
Liana exhaled so loudly it activated her video feed. James thought it was either relief or disappointment. But, the next words out of her mouth sounded more like desperation.
"Cuídate, Jana. Hay personas que todavía se preocupan por ti."
Jana, for her part, didn't seem moved.
"Fuera de mi camino, claro? Aviso final . No hasta que haya terminado. Adiós, Caruso," Jana returned, quickly and callously. Her Katinian made unwieldy by her instability, she cut the syllables as forcefully as she could.
Liana straightened out before responding. She cut her video feed.
"Perdónate." The last words Caruso said.
Jana's eyes returned to their usual stony focus. She clearly wasn't in the mood for socializing anymore. She terminated the connection, severing any channel other than the flight's own.
James hadn't understood any of it, but his sister's video feed had revealed the same somberness James had seen during Admiral Leinch's brief.
The Black Rose engaged its slipspace drive and disappeared into the silent maelstrom.
"Jana, I'm sorry, private channel please," Drippy interrupted nervously, apprehension trembling his voice in ways James had never heard. Toad had heard the network traffic, and James assumed whatever it was he had for her was important beyond giving her space to cool off.
"It can't wait."
The flight was silent all the way back to the Condottiere.