26 - Fight or Flight, Kill or Die

Kivi's Space Lanes

Amidst the Flotsam Fleet

Colonial Space

Minutes after the Gate Strike

/ Invader IIIR - 9499 KM - 008-215 \\

||LOCK WARNING||

It cost James McCloud far too many precious, dwindling seconds to differentiate between the trill bleating of the radar lock warning from the entanglement scan alarms. His peripheral vision lit up red and yellow with spuriously half-remembered lock codes of all kinds. His virtual intelligence, Gil, worked overtime to constrain them as best as it could.

The directional sensor's gotta' be busted. All directions? Can't be accurate, James' thought, uncharacteristically planning his next few moves as carefully as possible.

"James, echo your last message," Vukašin asked with disbelief. "You're going to do what?!"

"We're pushing out toward the gate!" James declared hastily.

The fox held a low angle pass on the port side of a derelict freight hauler, one probably older than Falco, based on their condition. At least seventy kilometers of rusted, bulk storage entombed in a steel hull. One of dozens left here by a long-folded salvage corps picking apart the tattered corpses of the derelict military craft here. My father's last battlefield.

"You two? Alone?! You saw the size of that fireball, right?" Falco argued from twenty-eight thousand kilometers away, chastising his adoptive son, "We don't even know what's out there."

"I'll let you know when I get there," James dismissed while toggling his ride's long range targeting pod. "Catch up, before I carve all the notches for the day."

Falco scoffed, knowing his ward well enough not to expect further results. He visibility malded on screen before addressing James' wingmate. "Poppy! Talk some sense into that dipshit."

James could see Hare's face contort with discomfort over the net. He looked out over his right shoulder. Sure enough, Poppy's red eyes were peering back at him.

"Don't say a fucking word," James' teased quietly over the pair's existing private channel. Poppy had been delighted by James' rare form. Her camera had been on and shared for the last twenty minutes, and James could see her bite her lip.

"Seven!" Vukašin's groveling mug barked. He'd hoped Poppy's militaristic callsign would jolt Jana's hand-selected prodigy back to her senses. 'Seven' didn't respond, but Poppy's vulgar grin grew larger.

"She's off her patrol route too!" the brown-flecked lizard advised, disappointed in the young Hare. "Where the hell is Jana?" he asked, with exasperation.

"I can't reach her. She went off-map!" Tadd Toad yelled off-screen.

"-What do you mean you 'off map?!'" Falco's voice demanded.

"I mean," Tadd soldiered on, unwilling to be silenced even by the great Falco Lombardi, "Our comms are being overwritten by someone else's traffic. The Sade relays have to be maxed out, but there's no contact down to Udeav. It's going one-way and one way only. Out."

Out. The frog grew paler, as the implications of a dark theory drained the blood from the surface capillaries under his blue skin.

"Sade's been compromised," Tadd finally eked, terrified of the implication.

"You think?" Falco insulted sarcastically, "Confirm that for us. Either way, we solve for the gate problem first, or there's gonna' be a lot of hungry faces in three short days."

James could see the blue toad nod furiously in agreement.

Falco's voice continued. "Everybody listen up. Focus. Don't speak unless you got solutions lined up. Suit up, shield up, whatever you need," the bird commanded, "Akach and I are pushin' out now."

James inhaled in frustration. The others were still talking.

"Everyone, shut the fuck up and get out of my ear!" An exasperated James' finally erupted. "Just point me in the right direction so we can do something."

James angrily swiped the yapping faces off his dashboard, pinching Vuka's holoimage between his fingers and tossing it asunder. Gil took its owner's frenzied meaning as minimize, which it faces shrank, with the exception of Poppy.

Now in silence, James was beginning to sense the icy drag of death. His radar Entangle Scans were chopping in-and-out as he neared his two-ship flight's jumpoff point for the gate.

He likely wasn't the first McCloud to have felt that way here before, either.

James' neck stung as he craned his head to gawk at every mountainous, pilfered wreck around Kivi's thin orbit. A mass grave of carriers, cruisers, frigates and hobbled-together sustainment vessels of a now-extinct pirate fleet. It was humbling, as if everything floating dead uselessly was his father's own handiwork. Death. But, there was life here too; a loss so total that the Flotsam scavenged its life blood from it.

A war cemetery, rusting away from the Flotsam's atmosphere leaks. He thought, his muzzle only a centimeter away from pressing against the portside of his canopy.

/ Invader IIIR - Contact Lost \\

"We're gaining and losing a mix of Invaders on our front axis past the debris field," Poppy read off her sensor panel. "three of em'."

Having learned his lesson from a few days ago, James immediately flicked his countermeasures on. He remembered the Invader class fighter's impressive missile payloads from a previous life and figured not much else had changed.

"We'll be over in ten," Falco assured, panting as he strapped into his trusty steed's custom-stitched red seats. "Keep your distance, keep em' distracted, we'll pick them off."

"Sure, Falco, we'll make sure they're real distracted for you," James' growled smugly, a bong signaling the release of his weapon's safeties. His throat closed up for a moment as he felt the weight of his taunt catch up with him. I have to do this now.

"Kid, just hang back and keep their talons off the Dot's neck. We only need ten minutes," Falco counteradvised.

"We'll only last five if we turn out backs," James replied truthfully.

Falco said nothing in return. James knew it might as well be an agreement from his old friend. Falco was likely steeling himself for the furious redline his custom Arwing's thrusters would receive.

Contact was lost with the Condotierre's datalink just a few short moments later. faded, hallucinating in the melee of entangled qubits inhabiting the steel jungle. 'Spooky action at a distance,' it may have been; but it was terrifying up close, now. James' own staggered breaths kept him company, and beside the occasional ping, they were truly alone.

James quickly assessed his wingmate's condition on her monitor. In truth, she looked to be handling it better than him. Wonderful. Fearless.

"It looks like it's just us for a little bit," James said on his private channel. "Nervous?"

"A little," the young Hare answered softly.

"Yeah," he agreed, heart racing again. "Me too."

"Watch my back?" She asked skittishly, her image poisoning James' focus with a small grin.

"My eyes never wandered far," James flirted. A lie, delivered reflexively.

No sooner than the words left his mouth, a launch alert triggered, turning his HUD red. At nearly ten-thousand kilometers, he had time. But, one lock led to two, and suddenly two was eight.

James angled his Arwing sharply, remembering the untested training of his youth. Notch the missiles.

/ Missile 1100 KM - 007-214 \\

|| Multiple Launch! ||

Much closer now! His first mistake, letting the bastards through. Poppy took an altogether different route, hugging the surface of the bulk-freighter's long central hull. She decreased her speed to use the vessel as cover.

"Keep close," Poppy instructed, taking the lead out from James' feet.

James followed. Can't notch every missile in that pack, James remembered, angry at his lack of decisive action. He corrected his flight path, sliding in behind Poppy Hare's tail wake. The silvery wedges plummeted to a gee-negated twenty kilometers an hour, so close they could shave small flakes of paint off the covering steel cruiser's hull if they'd wished.

Within a few seconds, all but one of the long-range locks disappeared as their radar image became one with the larger vessel. A single, stubborn lock warning remained, and James recognized the menace of its acronym. L-O-S. Line of Sight! Fuck! Someone is guiding someone else's missile in on us.

His head swiveled wildly, his panicked eyes finding no shortages of hiding spots in the rusty debris field. Ignorant of his own sensor suite's tools, he used his eyes instead.

"Traced," Poppy Hare said calmly, reacting quicker to the information duplicated on her Mark-Two's display. Her VI passed the information along. A dashed red line appeared off James' right shoulder, indicating an infrared lock emitting from their hidden enemy. They lurked in the gargantuan shipwreck to his five-o'clock low.

/ Missile 200 KM \\

"That thing's zippin'!" Falco said, monitoring from his own cockpit. "Use the wreck as cover or you're gone!"

His jaw clenched and his heart dropped. Fight or flight rocketed through James' veins as he received the raw hereditary adrenaline response he'd been gifted. James didn't think about it, he only saw red. He acted, turned his Arwing toward the threat and slammed both throttles forward. James thumbed his weapons pippers to bombs. Poppy never saw him tear off at full-thrust as she rolled right and took shelter on the opposing side of the wreck.

As James' Arwing clambered toward the opposing wreck at fifteen-hundred kilometers per hour and growing, his attacker's targeting laser held its true aim on the center James' cockpit. Right at him. James split his thrusters and rolled hard to the left and the right to break his hidden target's lock. As the scorched steel surface grew closer, so too, did the warhead home in on its mark. Poppy's red line tensed, growing less dashed and more solid as the proximity alarm sounded.

/ Missile 1000M \\

"James!" Poppy called out as she finally realized the grave mistake her wingmate had committed, "James, what are you doing?!"

Two hundred meters into his rage-blinded rush. James saw a glint; a reflection of Udeav Major's light. He didn't breathe as he approached his target with a vengeance. The laser's mark faltered only so slightly as James tested his mark's resolve.

James mindlessly devoted himself to Poppy's red-trace at full vernier thrust. Its origin, a rusted-out alcove nested in the old bulk freighter's final drive core. The vexed McCloud felt a whirlwind of butterflies in his chest the whole while across the gorge. He was exposed; naked.

One hundred meters more and the temperature rose further. James was on him. His target must have felt the sting of death arrive early. Like a teakettle left on the burner for just too long, the assailant's trace on James' canopy agitated, barely able to contain the mounting pressure.

You better not miss.

Seemingly reading James' fury, his phantom-in-ambush finally succumbed to their nerves. A predator, made prey! With barely a millisecond to spare, bright red laser fire melted through the paper-thin hull as his target burst out of its hull. James shot back with a green burst of his one-ninety kilowatt wing root lasers; three shots delivered to the center of the opposing craft's shielding. The projected red line shook violently for a mere quarter-second as the Invader rocked backward.

A streak of white and red wisped past James' cockpit's front windscreen leaving a thin contrail in the Flotsam's escaping water vapor. He hardly felt the detonation reverberate below him, and the sudden patter of metallic debris on his ventral hull.

It had been enough. James breathed freely when his brain recognized what had just happened. His dance with fate had been paper thin, and the intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol brought an entirely different McCloud out of him.

James wordlessly pressed the advance, the pirate having reverse thrust deeper into the wreck. So James hunted. His vision narrowed and a terrible focus took him; a power and confidence he'd never felt before in his life. There was a clarity in it, a call to arms. James blasted open the trawler's degraded hull plating with five synchronized shots from his wing cannons. It unraveled like a zipper and collapsed inward into the vacuum as he rammed through the softened, superheated steel.

The mind-altered McCloud pressed on through without mercy, bending back some of the feckless, melting steel. James' teeth grit, a lust for the hunt taking him.

Once inside the remains of the trawler, James' studied every rust pile, picked-through scrap heap and floating debris. Small beams of light penetrated in beams through the vacant shaft.

Nothing.

"Thermals," Gil advised verbally, reading James' microexpressions delicately.

A digitally-projected window applied itself on the windscreen projected white-hot thermals for James' view, though the floating micro debris made their use difficult. The projection followed its owner's eyes, moving around the cockpit wherever he looked.

'What would I do?,' James' thought. Remembering some of Falco's training. It's always 'What would I do?' Fighting with what they got. The small details. The big. What would I do?'

The numbness in James' legs was instructive enough.

I'd hide. James jittered.

He switched off the thermal sensors and observed the little, floating details around him. Not a vaportrail, but a slowly advancing pattern of bolts, bits and dust. As if someone had gently slided their vessel down one of the derelict freighter's arteries.

James retracted his wings and pushed forward on retro thruster power only. The central corridor, meant to shuttle containers on regrav platforms narrowed as James silently propelled his steed through it gently.

An illuminated red cloud of rust, dust and fragments all obscured James's vision. He turned his front-facing fog lights off with a wave of his hand. Gil comprehended this, and obeyed.

Silent seconds turned into the murky minute, testing James' resolve. This was not what the stories were like. Nothing the way he read about. More of a silent predation than a fight.

He nearly gasped when he saw it. The classic three-section hull and two vertical stabilizers of an Invader-Three, freshly angled thirty degrees to its portside about fifty meters down the hatchway. He'd nestled himself a space past a collapsed side panel, likely someone's old living quarters.

The brigand engaged James' with a solid red stream of saboted anger.

Though, his aim was apparently a single pip mark too high, as the one-hundred round volley beat itself against the bulkhead's steel. The terrible volley of firebolts lobbed deflected molten shards of tungsten and steel down the maintenance shaft before their combined mass malleted their way through the deck plating.

Ballistics, James' recognized immediately. Gil enabled his cockpit atmospheric shields as a precaution upon detecting the threat. Any one of these rounds could bypass shields and likely penetrate his front windscreen.

This is how he wants me to fight. Fuck that!

James yanked firmly to the rear on both control sticks, then reached upward to temporarily disable his G-loc. All servos obeyed his input as his Arwing retreated back in the direction it had traveled.

As James reversed, the invader expended more rounds, pumping more red tracer wildly in James' general direction. James shot back, and the dim hallway lit bright green in brief outbursts as the full fury of his wing-mounted cannons burned their way through the channel. James' hellfire ignited superheated trails through twenty-years floating refuse.

The few pinpricks of sunlit beams entering the rusting hulk became many as the Invader's wild shots attempted to track James down the hallway. A wicked voodoo doll tangled with golden threads.

The pirate wasn't done, either. The Invader barreled after James, Its sabots penetrating some of the aluminum outer hull panels above James, leaving a trail of floating dust illuminated in the brown-orange light of Udeav.

Have to be quick!

His opportunity to escape came seven meters later as he looked upward over his shoulder. James went full vertical hover, and retreated out into open space through a vacant docking tube, long since removed by scrappers.

He emerged amidship, near the belly of the wrecked trawler and inversed his course with a quick split-s maneuver to reduce closure. A strangulator's arithmetic: the pirate would follow him, and die now, or relocate and die later.

As he swung around, James' limited short-range comms thundered back to life for a mere moment.

"-Ames! Where are you? James! Please!" Poppy Hare screamed desperately, the sound of impact warnings sending James into a hot frenzy.

"Poppy!" James keyed back, 'I'm coming! Hold on!"

"James!" She called back, his broken transmission never having made it through. Now they were both alone.

James didn't think or plan, he didn't have the time nor inclination. Gil's programming anticipated his master's impulsiveness and switched his HUD to laser pips. James hugged the surface of the vessel once more, desiring a quick end to his challenger.

I can take a hit. He thought, heart beating like a drum in his hands, I can take it!

His attacker agreed, and a sea of red ripped out from his eleven-o'clock low.

Between tracers, two of the Invader's tungsten darts bounced off James' frontal arc, emitted green sparks of flaking plating as an awful, metallic groan filled his cockpit.

James yelped. His entire spine and lower body went ice cold and he was sick to his stomach.

Fight or flight, kill or die.

'James' chose flight, but a proper McCloud fought back. Without thinking, he began to rake the origin point of the fire as he chased after his prey. His green hellfire scorched the hull plating bright orange, blast-furnacing the bastard beneath it. There would be no more concealment, James McCloud and his Arwing's superiority would simply deny the pirate a proper furball.

It happened between the vulpes' wrathful shots, a sudden glimpse of Udeav Major's reflection by the red fox on a terminal warpath. A poorly-cellulosed canopy seen barely moving past an opening in the hull, bearing a man soon to be dead. The cruelty of his action never even occurred to James.

Obstruction was a winning equation if there was plenty of ship and time left for the bastard to evade. James' assailant lacked the latter entirely, no time to turn-tail and run. He was dead. Simple as. And, it seemed eventhe pirate realized it was his time.

Whoever he was, an outclassed pirate among the Flotsam; he also chose fight. It seemed like an eternity to James, as the Invader ascended rapidly under the guidance of four modified retro thrusters. It burst through the mottled seams of the civilian-thinned hull plating, spalling the Flotsam's terracotta decay upward in a rusty plume. He rose, the three barrels of his centerline gimballed cannon already beginning to spin.

James McCloud and his bloody gift were ready for him. Seventy-five meters, front, Invader in the open, James' familial instinct pumped through him.

Under fear's spell, James' perceived seconds stretched longer than the time between lightning and its thunderclap.

Fight. Live. His fingers were already crushing the triggers before his conscious decision was even made.

His Arwing obeyed. Blaster fire hammered the Invader shields until they fried, popped and gave way to the hull. James strafed right, keeping the trigger held down as the rate-limited green shot cooked his opponent alive.

Though it was barely a few seconds, James was unable to keep his eye's off the pilot thrashing about in his canopy. An older Venomian struggled in his seat, possibly reaching for his ejection handles or emergency shielding options. James' fire eventually disabled the Invader's port engine powerpack, taking the port stabilizer with it. A second later, a catastrophic internal explosion killed the pirate instantly, evaporating the Invader in a bright white explosion.

The muzzle of James' cannon glowed orange for a brief moment before extinguishing itself in the vacuum. The frontal arc of James' Arwing was baptized by the cloud of bits, pieces and debris from the collapsed Invader; the hollow 'glory' of James' first kill.

James gasped, finally breathing. He released a whimpering exhale so long, a part of his windscreen fogged for a moment. Like the flick of a lightswitch, his terrified numbness became a malformed exhaustion. He shivered, his fur on its end. There was no undoing in his act of aggression.

His first kill. And, James wouldn't have time to think about it.

He changed his bearing to open space and rocketed his left and right vernier thruster to their max potentials. He ran from the macabre debris he'd left behind, grimacing darkly as he pushed his opponents last, terrified moments from his mind.

Poppy Hare. He refocused. She needs you, now!

"Tadd! Falco! Tell me you can hear me!" James called out, wanting to hear a single comforting voice. His voice was desperate, shameful.

"J-James?" Todd's disbelieving voice asked, his image unable to appear on the screen. "Where have you been?"

"Where's Poppy?! I lost her!" James screamed back, ignoring Toad's question.

"She's on the run," Falco said, his voice carefully belying much relief at hearing James' own.

"We keep losing you both in the dust fields but she was eight-hundred klicks away last pindrop," The bird continued. "There's something els-"

The bird's voice fizzled away into a crackling buzz. But, he'd said the magic words. Pin drop. James buried his head into his hands and moaned.

"I need you!" James begged to all who would listen, "We're going for Poppy! All of us!"

His heart struck back, filling the gaps in his courage.

"Gil, I need her last recorded locations where you think she's at now," James asked.

"On it, boss," the personalized virtual intelligence responded, "It's on screen, now."

James' studied the map

James' reversed at full thrust, his g-diffusers working furiously to negate his disregard for physics as James aggressively stick-pulled Udeav Major back into his HUD. He accelerated into the rust field for what felt an eternity.

I can do this. James resolved, shaking his head. I can! Dad did it. Jana did it. I can fucking do it now, too!

James centered himself. He studied his instruments like both of his father's had instructed. He prioritized, and realized he had surfaced as the lucky one. His attacker had only bent some hull plating; no critical systems had been damaged.

Priorities. He triggered allscan on his communicator.

"Pops!?" He called out. "Poppy!"

He'd hoped to have heard Poppy's youthful, backcountry twang. Anything. But all that greeted him was a few seconds of pained silence and static.

James rushed toward Poppy's last known coordinates, and despite the racket of data plummeting away from Sade into deep space, James' short range communications interception fizzled alive as he hugged the freighter's surface.

"Redd?" A highland's accented firebrand asked. There were several impatient seconds of silence before she called out again. "Redd!"

James scoured his sensors, finding nothing more than the idea that he'd stumbled upon his counterpart.

He shifted, silent as the vacuum, despite being able to communicate with his opponent. Someone else looking for a lost friend.

"He's gone, Béa," another's masculine voice informed cautiously. By the sound of her furious calls James figured she might have already suspected it.

Redd. His victim's name cauterized a four-letter scar into James' heart as he learned it. It burned as he desperately wished he could have unlearned it.

Béa, the pirate, went silent for a moment. But, the tensity of her burden could be felt from kilometers away.

"One-Tooth!" She finally cracked; James' Arwing intercepted their communications.. "Ditch your wreck. Cross load with Newbie. Get your drive spooled and fook off. Shep will cover."

"I gotta ride nut-to-butt with the kid for the next three days?" The one called One-Tooth wailed, disbelievingly immune to the sting of his comrades' death.

"It's that or a much more permanent ride as slag, Tooth!" The squadron leader screamed back.

There was no more dissent before she planned on, "Pup's alone. His reinforcements haven't come yet. Missile trucks, change your target and wrap up your magazines on that carrier an' bolt! Keep the original exit vector but meet us at the alternate rally point. Don't wait for us."

"What about you, boss?" Another's voice asked.

A camera feed was enabled on James's all-scan interface. 'Béa' was furious, and James knew her answer before her lips moved.

"Redd might still be alive if I was here," she said. A penance. "I won't be making that mistake again."

James' scan took longer to complete than it should have, and, despite the interference, he was shocked with the output displayed on his front canopy. James' ever-snooping targeting pod found its mark, an AeroSpace AL4, Corneria's Lylat War classic! James' had always loved that ship class since he was a boy. A purebred dogfighter, now hopelessly outclassed.

"Beá! It's an Arwing." Her comrade begged in a vain attempt to return her to sanity.

An image appeared on his dash, and this time it was offered freely; a willful request to a duel. A red-eyed, Akita canid. Angrier than James thought possible

"You need more time, yeah?" The pirate called Béa bellowed, "This is how. This is why my share is larger! Now, fook off!"