Chase looked at the display with unmasked satisfaction as the last red dot disappeared from his radar. The remaining pieces of the fighter he had just blown out of space came burning against his frontal shields, illuminating the cockpit with radiant blue light for a brief instant. He took the opportunity to make a quick systems check. His shields were still in the green, standing strong at eighty percent and recharging. He had only exhausted half of his missiles against the eleven kills he had made in the last twenty minutes of combat. Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all…
The thought quickly died as the ship’s computer broke the triumphant silence. The computer spoke with a soft, sexy, female voice—probably way too sexy for a star fighter navicomputer designed mainly for dogfights. But this was an old Manticore Mark II model, which was equipped with outdated software. Chase had to admit, when it came to the voice, there were times when he didn’t mind.
“Multiple enemy targets on approach vector,” said AINI, the Artificially Intelligent Navicomputer Interface. The radar let out four successive, high-pitched beeps as each of the targets progressively appeared on the scope. They were flying in a standard square formation, one pair of fighters covering for the other. The grin slowly faded from Chase’s face. A dogfight against four enemies with no wingman was not to be taken lightly, not if one wanted to live long enough to talk about the encounter. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to face such odds, but each time he had, it had cost him and his ship dearly. And here he’d hoped to bring the fighter back to bay with as few scratches as possible. Wishful thinking.
As the fighters approached, his mind raced over the different tactics that applied to such a situation. The academic ones as well as the crazy ones—those that most dogfight instructors would consider not only insane, but also directly against practically all the rules in the flight book. Standard by-the-book tactics would dictate prudence by trying to reduce the number of enemies from the first pass, allowing the pilot to concentrate on killing the next target while avoiding only a pair of bogies. A feat which in itself was far from easy.
Chase’s main instructor and war hero, Admiral Tharowni, would say that a couple of missiles locked and fired at the exact moment bogies entered firing range had a ninety percent chance of scoring a kill, reducing the odds to three against one. Again, not easy, but statistically preferable to trying to engage in a dogfight while being pursued by three enemy vessels. But Chase never fought thinking about the statistics or the odds. While he respected the wisdom in such a course of action, losing two out of his three remaining missiles so early in the fight was not something he was prepared to do, at least not today.
“Enemy craft entering firing range,” AINI purred with all the charm programmed into her vocal subroutines.
Time to make a decision. In only a few seconds, Chase’s fighter would be in a shower of enemy laser fire. He needed a plan.
“Let’s try something new, shall we?” he said aloud. This rhetorical banter was rather routine for him and his sensual computer. One-sided, but routine.
Three seconds later, heavy laser fire started to fall around his fighter’s canopy like red rain, occasionally igniting the shields. Pulling hard on the stick, the fighter effectively rolled and dodged, avoiding most of the damage. But his enemies were still closing on him at high velocity, firing all the while. “Missile lock!” AINI sounded as alarmed as she could, humming with the familiar buzz that warned of imminent danger. A slow smile spread up the side of Chase’s face. Time seemed to slow, then for a split second, it stopped altogether. Now!
He released countermeasures and his fighter veered sharply and made a tight break to the right, still not firing a single shot. The incoming missile fell for it. The port shields received part of the incoming laser fire while the internal structure of the fighter moaned in disagreement over its rough handling. Clearly not designed to be subjected to a brutal ninety-degree break while at full afterburner speed, the ship made warning noises and lit a red LED light across the primary alarm panel. The ship’s inertial dampeners were clearly not made for this kind of abuse. As always, the dangerous creaking and flashing was accompanied by the silky vocal explanations of AINI.
“Structural integrity failure imminent,” she warned. Unfortunately for the ship, in Chase’s mind “imminent” still meant that he had a couple more seconds. That was, coincidentally, all the time he needed. Once he pulled out of his break, the primary alarm LED turned from red to yellow. Automatic systems were redirecting power to structural integrity to compensate for the ship’s mistreatment. Soon, it would turn green as power would be siphoned off other systems like shields, guiding systems, weapons, and even life support.
A quick glance at the radar showed Chase that his maneuver had gone exactly as planned, forcing the quartet of ships to break hard left to follow him and take position at his six o’clock. He could almost see his instructors holding their heads in their hands; such a display would most certainly be defined as “reckless flying.” He brushed the thought away and shook his head to clear it. He would need perfect concentration if he intended to leave this dogfight as something more than a floating pile of space rubble.
Streaks of laser fire passed by his canopy again, but this time from behind and, while many of the hits reduced the aft shields, he still thought that this tactic, however highly dangerous, would pay off. He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. He was about to find out.
“AINI, prepare to execute maneuver Theta-4 on my mark.”
“Loaded and ready,” she answered almost instantly.
“NOW!”
The next instant, AINI killed the afterburners and engaged the reverse thrusters while simultaneously boosting their power by redirecting ninety percent of every other system’s power into them, leaving the ship with minimal shielding for just a few milliseconds. Chase sucked in a deep breath. If the enemy had anticipated such a maneuver, those milliseconds would no doubt mean the end of him. But sure enough, the fighters were caught completely off guard and sailed past him like shooting stars into the quiet night.
Once AINI’s sensors detected that the targets had passed by, she automatically re-balanced the power, redistributing it equally between two main systems: forward engines and weapons. The Theta-4 maneuver was programmed to stay in this distributed power scheme for ten seconds. More than enough time for Chase to rain deadly supercharged firepower upon his foes, effectively draining their aft shields while they undoubtedly tried to understand what had just happened to them. After a few seconds of showering a full spread of laser fire, he quickly selected the two enemy fighters that had lost more than half their shields and locked onto them with a missile each.
When AINI acknowledged the locks, he simultaneously fired the missiles and turned quickly on the third craft’s vector, the one which had its aft shield at the minimum. Chase aligned his vessel perfectly to his foe, not letting it breathe. Each of its attempts to dodge were carefully anticipated and compensated for. There was no escape. Its structural integrity started to decrease rapidly and most of his laser shots were now scoring holes in its metal armor, leaving a trail of sparks and chunks of metal in its wake. A few seconds later, it finally exploded in a bright fireball.
One down, thought Chase.