Starlight: Too Close For Comfort

The only thing darker than the seating in this cantina, unfortunately, was my memory of it. The last time Harrison and I had met -- at least, when we weren't shooting at Machi or at each other -- was in this cantina. This very booth, in fact, in the very seating arrangement I had slid into by habit with my pistol hand toward the door just in case.
The ale stood thick and the smoke ever thicker in this place. Sappy jazz fought its way through the haze just well enough to annoy me. Either turn the volume up or shut it off! I yelled with my mind at the bartender.1

Harrison sipped her high-dollar bourbon in a deceptively ladylike fashion. Everything she did was deceptive. Her wittiness was a lie just like her blood lust, but at the same time her "hidden" innocence and gentleness weren't really her either. A woman made completely of lies, through and through. Only her speech was undeniably honest, if you could discern the meaning of it.
"It's a shame you were sent off before the last battle," she squeezed out between sips. No man I knew could take that high-proof past his lips without a flinch. "You would have enjoyed it."
I kept glaring at her. She wanted me to say something. She wanted me to treat her how she'd always been treated.2

"That fleet they're looking for isn't just a fleet."
Compared to the muffled organic whine of the saxophone through the speakers overhead, the stepped hum of her voice was actually rather pleasing. Systematic and predictable at the least.
"If anyone survives, it will be-"
"I didn't meet you here to hear about our doom," I wedged in, taking the last of my whiskey in a gulp. "If fate wanted me dead it would have led me to running a business."
She glared back at me for a moment, and took another draw from her glass. A bit longer this time. Then she pulled a chunk of metal from her pocket and tossed it onto the table between us. "I'm sorry, but I'm out of time," she said as she stood and buttoned her jacket. "Pre-flights, you know."3

I was pretty sure she wasn't a full-on psychic, but I'll be damned if there wasn't something to her. Not three steps into her egress, the whole ship went haywire with scramble alerts. I snatched up the shard from the table and stuffed it in my breast pocket. Right over my heart. If I was going to die in battle, I wanted it to be an ironic death.4

---------------------------------------------5

Harrison and I held loose formation at full throttle towards Neptune Station Seven, a quarter orbit around the planet. From a distance we could see that the battle was already a disaster zone for both Flight Corps and the Machi fighters. The Capitals were closer than they should have been by a long shot, and I kept seeing explosions where there was no cannon fire. Collisions. Many pilots weren't even surviving long enough to take shots before they ran through another fighter, either friend or foe.
I swung my nose towards the back side of the Machi line, not wishing to become an unfortunate obstacle in some unobservant pilot's flight path. I'd have more of the attention of the back line battleships, but also more space to work with.
Harrison, however, stayed on course towards the Bubble of Death, as she had called the fight zone in one hundred percent seriousness. I was both officially and unofficially disallowed from challenging her decisions in the battlefield, so I maintained radio silence and kept focused on my plan.6

One of the corvettes looked low on power and was diverting shields away from their sensor array to maintain a frontside defense. I swept in through their EMP cast-off and countered the field fuzz with my God-given eyesight. Two dumbfire rockets into the struts sent the sensor array drifting away while the turrets locked up, blind. I scanned ahead for the next nearest shield hole in the line and set up a second run. The destroyer ahead was oscillating their shields too quickly for me to get a good run, so I rounded it as closely as I could and moved on to the next destroyer, going again for the sensors...7

Sometime between shield interference fields, though, I caught a bit or two of transmission: "... your ass, Duncan!" This also happened to be about the same time that Cypher began flashing the warning map that basically says hey dude, you're about to get shot by ten different pilots.
I glanced at the local space map sometime after making two dizzying sharp ells and catching my breath again. Rounding on my position were indeed a dozen Machi fighters just outside my effective fire radius. If I ran, they would simply cloud-fire until I couldn't possibly dodge every shot. I had to do something more... creative.
I killed my main throttle and pitched a one-eighty, such that the Ultimatum pointed somewhere in the vicinity of the Machi squadron's turn path as it drifted backwards at combat speed. Perfect. I activated the gravity inducer and choked hard on the triggers: every barrel on my ship hurled their hot gases at the approaching units. The unexpected barrage was enough to jar them into a panicked play for survival, fighting against my inducer to turn away from the speeding plasma. Their surprise bought me enough time at least to re-assess, if not to make my own move on their tails.8

I don't know if I first saw the warning on my nav screen or heard the Voice's warning; either way, my consciousness was booted to co-pilot as the Machi flight neared my location, and I threw my hand hard on the throttle. I felt the odd half-tearing of time that only occurs near superspace intrusions as the Ultimatum kicked forward.
An instinctual glance over my shoulder revealed that a late-coming battleship had warped into my path not a moment too late. The captain hadn't considered the possibility of fighter traffic this far behind the line, and the mistake turned a risky jump into a disastrous one: The first two of the fighters I'd just engaged were shredded at an atomic level into pure energy as they intersected the chronospatial reformation, leaving gaping molten holes in the front half of the flagship; six more slammed into the port hangar, and two smashed through the underside of the raised bridge.
I switched off the gravity inducer again and spun around to find the remaining fighters. The dead battleship hurtled through the bubble in a direct line course towards Neptune Seven even as the capital ships made the most extreme maneuvers possible to steer clear of the helpless dreadnought. Radio chatter was through the roof as pilots warned each other to make way and the captains of the line scrambled to hold the defenses as they relocated. I glanced over to see Harrison's P27 dropping cluster charges outside a destroyer's hangar even as she tailed a Machi, guns blazing.9

As my own targets were still disoriented from the severity of their evasive maneuvers, the hunt was simple enough for me to have Cypher patch into the capital ship PAs. One of the cruisers was preparing to ram the Machi battleship off of its collision course with Neptune Seven. A corvette called Charlie had been forced into the Bubble and the captain was asking for Flight Corps support. The destroyer South Wind had suffered catastrophic engine failure due to the superspace arrival of the Machi battleship and was drifting away from the fight. In short, our line was collapsing.10

I broke off chase to cover Charlie from what was left of the Machi fighter swarm. Harrison, on the other hand, had another plan...