FSE

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Chapter 19

Like shoals of piranhas swarming through an endless black sea, the two armadas swarmed toward one another at immense speeds made ponderous by the sheer emptiness of space. Captain Leith watched, heart thundering with the blood-churning rush of coming battle as her great vessel swam powerfully in the wake of dozens of capital vessels and hundreds of deployed star fighters, so many that their screen could barely keep up with their sheer number.

Hundreds of communications bounced back and forth, officers to crews, captains to captains, admiral to the fleet. The flurry of motion among crews was so at-odds with the graceful flight of the awe-inspiring naval flotilla's motion through space that she almost laughed. To her left, Commander Forza sat upright, prim and proper, his tall pointed ears forward and eyes running the many calculations his labyrinthine mind tended towards.

Captain Leith's brain was immersed in sensation, processing on an utterly different level. She predicted where enemies would move, which weapons would be fired, and where her whirling dervish of a battleship would go for the greatest contribution to this insane and desperate dance. Forza was all numbers and charisma, and Adriana was all intuition, art, and forceful passion. Together, they complemented perfectly.

"Helmsman, when the front lines engage, be careful of friendly ships' lines of motion, and keep us moving at best speed and maneuverability to cover the torpedo cruisers in the center. Mr Torvals, I want you to focus our offensive fire on anything that tries to bull through that front line."

"Aye, Captain," both bridge personnel called out.

"Chief, I want two gravity rings prepared for deflection. Keep the deflection zones in line with what's facing the enemy as much as possible."

"Aye, Cap'n," rang through her comm. system.

"Major Thaurun, direct our fighters to stay near us. We won't be engaging offensively in the opening part of battle. When the battle lines merge, we'll be breaking from combat to deliver a special payload planet-side. I want the fighters to clear the way for us when we do, then be on torpedo and fighter interdiction when we're out of the formation."

The iron-grey otter looked back at her with a quirked brow, but nodded and responded in the affirmative. Few on the officer staff knew about their special mission, and she judged it smart to keep things that way. Not for any kind of mistrust - she knew these officers far too well to think them treacherous. More so that their unconscious motions wouldn't telegraph their intent to the enemy too early.

As Sun Tzu had once said, "To trick one's enemies, one must first trick one's friends."

Noticing Galen's ear flick as a subtle signal, she sat back from the edge of her chair, where she'd unknowingly perched forward like a cat getting ready to spring. She gave a sheepish internal grin and leaned back into the lumbar-support, forcing her hands to loosen on the padded chair's arms. For now, it was time to wait.

Patricia Blake wasn't the kind to get scared easily. In all of her 13 years, she had lived in one of the most unsafe, violent, uncontrolled cities in the 'civilized' parts of the galaxy. At age six, she'd seen her father killed when tweaked-out thugs had busted into their home. At age ten, her brother and three of his friends had savagely attacked and nearly slain a mange-ridden homeless puma that had trapped her in an alleyway at knifepoint, demanding that she get in his car or get stabbed.

Now, she was curled up as small as her gangly young-teen body could get, tucked into a tiny hollow within a pile of metallic debris, trying to stay so utterly quiet that even her thundering heart couldn't be heard.

The first black-clad, face-masked gunman slid soundlessly into the vast underground chamber, sweeping his stubby sinister-looking SMG around to clear the refuse-choked and rusting cavern, as two other members of his team emerged from behind him. Not fifty feet away, the slender wolf girl forced herself to stay dead still, praying with silent ferventness that the grease and rock dust Tenh had smeared her with would help blend her into the refuse as thoroughly as he'd said it would.

In her paws, she clutched the combat knife he'd given her, still sheathed and pressed against her chest. Fighting down fear and the impulse to visualize what would happen to her if she was found, Trisha thought back over what Tenh had told her about using the thing.

The three operatives were moving in quick, efficient patterns, covering one another as they checked debris with quick scans of their goggle-covered eyes. With no fur exposed, their eyes behind black plastic, they looked like alien monsters out of nightmare come to snatch her away to their horrifying realm of terrors. The truth, she thought, was that they would likely just shoot her in the head and leave her corpse for the rats.

Then one of them stopped, looked up, back behind him, and stayed in position a few seconds, busy with something that occupied his attention too much to keep moving. Tenh had told her to watch for that, instructing her that such a movement was likely a precursor to sending in a signal to let other teams know they were still alive. If they were to take out this team and have the most amount of time to get clear before other teams came to investigate, they would have to wait till just after.

Trisha squeezed her eyes shut. She knew what was about to happen, and was scared sick at the thought of watching kindly old Mr. Tenh doing what she knew he was about to do.

Like a leviathan breaching from the deeps, the giant lion burst from a heap of broken metal parts, slamming a long tanto-tipped combat knife into the straggler's spine, just where it met his skull. Before the pig-stuck fur could even make noise by jerking, Tenh's other massive paw came up and launched a steel-headed tomahawk into the second rear-most operator. Internally decapitated, head attached only by flesh and a quivering axe-blade, the second fur flopped bonelessly to the ground.

The front-running operative whipped around and fired off three shots of his SMG, splattering flesh and gore off his dead compatriot as Tenh used the knife in the corpse's skull to hold it upright and relied on its body armor to shield him. Though the bullets passed through the front half of the armor, passage into the meaty corpse slowed them enough that they failed to overpenetrate the second layer of armoring.

With a silence so eerie Trisha wondered how it was possible, the shadowy golden giant raised a boot and slammed it into the limp-spined corpse, sending it flying into the gunman, before planting his foot down again and charging without giving any opportunity for the staggering soldier to recover.

It was over in moments. The gunman brought his weapon up to chest height, trying to get shots off to at least slow the charging behemoth while staggering under the weight of his dead compatriot. Of the three-round burst, only one round ejected before the near-superhuman speed of his oncoming foe slammed his bulk into the gunman and slapped his arm wide, sending the next two rounds caroming off the ceiling. Then Tenh's paw shot out, hooked into a cruel claw formation that slammed up into the operative's jaw, ripped through the soft flesh there, and then yanked backwards with all of the enormous lion's might.

Trisha stared in awe-struck horror, as Tenh ripped the fur's lower jaw off with a sickening wet crackle and a spray of blood, then bashed the staggering, gagging, dying warrior in the head with his own mandible, sending him crashing to the rubble-strewn floor to join his already-dead companions. With a derisive flick, he cast aside the fleshy bit, and waved his gore-soaked paw towards her as the masked and jaw-less warrior choked and bled out in spurts on the floor at Tenh's feet.

"Trisha. Come. We have to move."

She knew he'd killed the other soldiers that had chased them in the tunnels. It didn't help her break from the strange paralysis, as she stared, transfixed by the twitching, shitting corpses he'd just made of three living furs. With two stalking strides, Tenh was in front of her, leaning down to grab the girl by her upper arm, pulling her to her feet.

Her vision was filled with his face, all the gold and white fur, those crow's-footed intense brown eyes like pools of eternal chocolatey night. He gave her a short, sharp shake that snapped her from the horror-struck realization that her guardian had just murdered three other human beings like cattle in a slaughter house.

"Trisha. Now."

She nodded, still unable to martial words she wouldn't have spoken anyway, and moments later was following him at a quiet-footed run through the filthy deep tunnels, as the sound of soldiers finding their dead companions sounded somewhere distantly behind them.

Her legs were burning with fatigue. They'd been running for two days now, a seemingly endless swarm of enemies hot on their trail. Tenh kept killing them, but they just seemed to keep coming, relentless, faceless shadow devils with death in their paws and an utter lack of sympathy for a poor confused girl growing rapidly more exhausted by the hour.

When they finally found another spot to rest, it was in an abandoned basement, likely beneath some old auto-shop judging by the ruined hydraulic lift systems on the floor. Panting, the young girl helped Tenh to close the big steel door behind them, then pile rubble against it to make stealthy entry impossible.

When she finally slumped, muscles screaming for relief and rest, she noticed the blood and shredded flesh on his chest. Her eyes went wide like saucers, as she shot back to her feet, only to wince as her legs tried to cramp solid.

"Mr. Tenh, you're bleeding!" she hissed, a hard whisper that would be muffled to nothing by the door and tunnels.

He looked down, at the spot where he'd been shot, as if just noticing it. That first bullet from the SMG had struck him just below the heart, penetrating his armored flesh despite the dermal weave and leaving a ragged, slightly scorched hole. The great mountain grunted slightly and brought his paw down, feeling around the edge as it seeped blood.

Transfixed, Trisha could only watch as the big lion closed his eyes and sat down, carefully folding his legs with surprising flexibility for his great age.

"Don't worry. I'm fine."

Hypnotized by the strangeness of it, she collapsed back down into an exhausted sit, and watched as his flesh began to shift as if being pushed about from the inside. He showed no sign of pain, only concentration, as his skin shivered, muscles clenched, and a squashed bit of metal fell from the wound with a soft 'clink' as it joined its new friends on the refuse-strewn floor.

Before her very eyes, the wound was sealing shut, knitting as if she were watching a time-delay camera of healing wounds over a month of time in just minutes. Finally, when it stopped, his flesh was naked and pink in that spot, but flawless and un-scarred. The old male leaned back against a broken lift, and grunted, sweating, as his stomach growled loud enough she feared the soldiers might hear.

"If I explain, you will be in no more danger than you are already. Do you wish to know?"

Trish stared at him, feeling oddly detached, as if she were watching two strangers squatting in a filthy hell-hole, hiding from swarming death as the city above burned, talking of things she couldn't understand.

She nodded her head.

In the halls beyond their hidey hole, teams of special operatives were hunting, checking every hole and hollow, their orders without nuance; they were to search for and destroy two enemies of their shadowy masters.

Safely jacked in to the special world of pure sensory experience, Void Shadow cruised through the darkness of space in his sleek stealth joint-strike fighter. He had beautiful, long lines, a winged wedge designed for atmospheric entry and space combat, loaded up with powerful third-generation rail gun weaponry designed to leave no tracers to give away his position in the airless vacuum.

To his port side, Solomon Sign trundled along in his bulky transport, for once invisible to Void Shadow's all-seeing sensory eye. It was a sad feeling, which made the squirrel feel somehow lonely and alone, despite the churning masses of vessels all around them, fighters zipping to and fro in trim and expert formation, battleships and cruisers and destroyers scudding through the void like great behemoths of legend.

At that moment, there were more living furs within his range of sight than he'd seen in months. Hundreds of thousands of naval personnel, Marines, Army, Ix'kat warriors, all unified in a single purpose; defeat the enemy, retake an embattled industrial world, rescue its inhabitants. Yet all the same, without his lover and partner visible through a clear cockpit canopy, Void felt all alone in the dark for the first time.

Randy Kerrick's voice came through the intercom, suddenly banishing the loneliness in a sparkle of joy, despite his dry and professional voice.

"The flotilla will be at engagement range in sixty seconds, Void. Remember the plan. We stay with the Fist until things start mixing up, then make a Hail Mary for the planet."

"Aw. Here I was hoping to go out there and add to my kill count!"

Randy snorted into the mic. Void Shadow could tell he was nervous, always with the pre-battle jitters, that always faded into calculating, cool grace in the heat of combat.

"Bill, your showboating is going to get you killed one of these days."

"Pff, yeah right. Showboating is what keeps me alive. Everyone's too busy watching me show off to shoot at me!"

That got a snicker out of the lizard, the banter back and forth on their proprietary channel finally free of interruptions by overbearing CAGs. It was their favorite thing, so far, about the SOG unit - They had dedicated channels nobody else could listen in on or interrupt them over. Void Shadow felt a bit cheated that they weren't going to be dogfighting this way.

Then an authoritative voice piped over the main channel, loud and clear and far more important than simple lovers' quibbling.

"All ships and pilots, this is Rear Admiral Ryan Vernier. I am giving the order to engage at this time. Stay to the battle plan and victory is ours. That is all."

Far to the front, the Hadrian-Class Super Battleship called Sword of Sol, flagship of the fleet, engaged its maneuvering thrusters and began to climb, slowing as the fleet began to surge by beneath it in a great cloud towards the oncoming horde of opposing vessels. Below the panoramic battlefield, Centauri VII spun slowly, wreathed in night broken by flashes of battlefield light, fires, and city lights.

The first volley of torpedoes were fired at maximum range, a tremendous swarm of hundreds of ship-killing fish hurled into the void. All of the engaging torpedo drive systems seemed to Void Shadow like new stars being born, only to live short lives as they plunged at tremendous speed towards the enemy. As the Fist of the Nascent Dawn maneuvered to its ordered place, he and Solomon Sign followed, though Void was still able to watch as the two great clouds of torpedoes passed one another in the instants before they would reach the other fleets' point defense screens.

Then the great limitless night was lit by lines of fire, billions of dum-dum bullets belched out by automatic point-defense systems, interlaced with guided plasma pulse cannon fire and anti-missile rockets, high-explosive cannon fire from swarming fighters, all designed to intercept what would otherwise have ended the battle in moments.

Hundreds of Torpedoes were blown from the darkness, limned in the briefest of fires or shredded apart in silvery chunks, sent spinning into the nothing by a tremendous volume of accurate fire. Void Shadow knew it was only the beginning, though, and the instinct to go fight, to go defend his comrades aboard the largely immobile capital ships was almost overwhelmingly strong.

He watched as a torpedo clawed its way through the intense defensive fire, bleeding blobs of plasma fire from its damaged drive system, and crash into one of the fleet's frigates with a blinding flash of soundless light. Shredding armor was expelled from the stricken ship, as its drives failed, the terrible ship-killer torpedo having penetrated its armor and superstructure to shatter the vessel's spine somewhere deep inside.

In moments, the vessel seemed to simply tear itself apart, spinning in two directions at once as harmonic shockwaves and internal secondary detonations rent the vessel to bits, ending the lives of its hundreds of crewmen in seconds. Void prayed some of them might survive, in their independent bulkheads and escape pods. Such losses, though, were to be expected - This was naval battle on a massive scale, unlike anything seen in centuries. People were going to die.

The opening exchange of heavy torpedoes was almost a formality, in fleet battles Void had personally seen. Rarely did the first salvo cause heavy losses. It was mostly a way to show off one's offensive firepower, to cow enemies into immediate flight at the overwhelming array of ways to die arrayed before them. Additionally, he'd read that many fleet commanders used the initial salvo as a way to judge which of his enemy's ship were crewed by the most seasoned veterans, based on their reaction to coming under deadly fire.

Away, towards the edge of his sensors, great brilliant blasts were echoing what he'd just seen amongst his own fleet, in miniature thanks to the astronomical distances involved. Enemy ships had been hit, too, and by the flashes he guessed it was more than just the single loss taken so far by his allies. Meanwhile a dozen light frigates towards the rear of First Fleet's formation, barely capital ships, engaged their RT drives and jumped away from the fight at blurring relativistic speeds, quickly vanishing from sight.

They would be back, he knew, as tactical reinforcements and to use the Torpedo Run effect on large and heavily armored enemy capital ships once their escort screens were destroyed or drawn off. While often useless in the opening parts of battle, Torpedo Run was invaluable in the middle and long game. Massive super-carriers and heavy battleships could be so resilient that conventional weapons were largely incapable of putting them out of action. Fusion nukes would crack them open, but it would take too many hits. The same was true of ship-killing torpedoes. The singularity torpedo, however, would rip their heavy armor to bits, at the very least crippling even the mightiest of ships with a direct hit.

The real problem with using a Torpedo Run was that even large, slow vessels were in constant motion, especially early in a battle. In the ten seconds or so between initiation of a jump and arrival, they might be out of the line of fire, wasting the significant energy resources necessary to generate another RT-drive jump.

Thus, a light frigate leaping in to hurl its black ball of death would be stuck, unable to jump again until its fusion core had generated enough energy, and likely be converted from sitting duck to smashed insect by an angry fusillade of naval gun batteries. Better to wait until enemy vessels had damaged engines, or were hemmed in by allied fire, before transmitting the order for one of the Torpedo Runner vessels to jump and attack.

Soundless lightning-flashes signaled to him that the front ranks were engaging, hurling streams of armor-piercing conventional rounds, silvery lines of rail gun fire, con-trails signaling rockets in flight. Fighter wings began to surge forward in a massive wave, a tsunami of calculating, swarming destruction-in-potentia flying past him.

He felt like surfing that wave, climbing to its top like an orca, waiting and watching for unwary prey upon which to swoop and feed. The ace fighter pilot sighed, watching the dog fight preparing to start, like the initial mortar shots of a firework display, drives streaking in their hundreds and thousands towards the enemy.

Even though they were no longer under the CAG's control, they still had a line to her. Void Shadow listened as she spoke, informing them as to what was going on out there.

"Front lines are engaging at close range. We expect the second line to engage almost directly afterward."

Chatter was rising, and the squirrel listened in. Friendly fighters were engaging seasoned veteran enemy forces, with predictable results. He couldn't flinch, jacked in like he was to the special world of his neural connection, but he sure felt like he had. It was never pleasant hearing transmissions cut off by the death of a pilot, though those calls were liberally seeded with exultant cries of victory as enemy numbers were brought down.

Like clockwork, fighter groups were put into the fight one after another, creating a great scrum of battle between the colossal fleets as they maneuvered for advantage, firing naval rail cannons and torpedoes into one another's front ranks, shattering armor and denting hulls.

With an engagement of this size, such a prelude could go on for hours. Void Shadow settled in.

Derry had his eyes closed, head tilted back against the wall of the flying death-trap, and was once again going over the mission parameters in his head when a paw gently nudged his side. Nivea, he knew, since she was the only one that would dare touch the keyed-up Marine.

"Hey. How you doing, Sarge?"

The big black wolf grunted, and hoped the rest of the unit wasn't getting as nervous as he'd been for the last couple of hours. In their metal box of a transport ship, even with optical and electronic camouflage covering them like a triple-thick blanket, they were extremely vulnerable. A direct hit from any naval-grade weapon and their whole team would be instantly spaced.

Nevermind that he kept flashing back to that flaming accident, the one where he'd lost a tail and an eye. The big cybernetic tiger tail that replaced his original one flexed, sliding metal on metal as it did.

"I'm fine, Niece. Just trying to get some shut-eye."

Normally she would have ribbed him, pressured or taunted him, all part of the game. Now, she was addressing a superior enlisted Marine, and in front of other members of the team he was now officially in charge of. Digging an admission of fear out of him would be dumb as hell, and she let off immediately.

"Any idea when we're going to get the go-ahead?"

"Not a clue. You'll be the first to know."

As if he'd spoken with a Bard's tongue, the intercom crackled. From the Fist's bridge, Captain Adriana Leith's voice came through loud and clear, calm but powerful.

"Dragonslayers, this is Captain Leith. Break away and go in thirty seconds. We will clear a path for you."

Randy Kerrick's voice came over the intercom, into the passenger compartment, a moment later.

"There's an enemy destroyer between us and the LZ. This might get choppy, so um...Grab onto something, and make sure your buddies are belted in."

"Harness check!" Derry called out, jolting half the team from a doze and into an immediate flurry of checking, tugging, re-snapping, and calling it out. Derry turned to his left, checking Niece's buckles, then waited for Derkin to check his own. With a couple of tugs, he received a shoulder pat, and called out he was good to go.

Finally, he looked back towards the steps down into the cargo bay.

"Corpsman, could you make sure Olliver's in his Walker? I want him ready to move down that ramp the second we're touched down."

"You got it, Sar'nt."

The armadillo unsnapped and straightened up from his seat, making for the steps as Randy's voice came over the intercom again.

"We're moving out now. Hold onto your asses."

Olliver had been picking at his leg cast, grumbling blackly as he sat alone in the cargo hold, propped up in a specially-rigged corner where a five-point harness kept him uncomfortably but securely stable and safe.

"Fucking cast," he grumbled, poking at it, at the extension of his arms' length. Ever since Blake had blown Lady Luck out from under him, he'd been in various stages of plaster and then softer casts for his damaged leg bones. The docs had seemed almost perplexed at what to do, since he was allergic to the nano-machine treatments they normally used to repair such things. What would take just a few days to heal under the high-tech treatment would take months to heal fully with his body's natural recuperation.

He was lucky. The break had occurred a few inches below his knee, folding his leg backwards and almost in half when his old cockpit had crumpled. If the break had been a few inches higher, he wouldn't have been able to fit into a Walker of the newly-named Black Jack's size class.

Heavy footsteps pulled him from his thoughts, as he felt a shift in the transport's equilibrium. There, coming down the steel-slat steps, was the male who made his chest clench up every time he got close. Olly was pretty sure, to his existential disgust, that he was falling in love with the armadillo. Something he felt was frankly silly, given they'd known one another such a short time.

"Hey, we should get you loaded in."

Olliver frowned slightly, but nodded, as he turned to look towards the Walker as it crouched like a knight at vigil in the midst of the cargo hold, secured by magnetic clamps.

"Yeah. Help me up?"

The big armadillo grinned and knelt down, leaning one side against the armored wall as deft paws moved to unsnap the harness. Then he lifted Olly up, as the otter turned his face away from his something-complicated's chest. The two were quickly approaching his Walker, as Olliver reached into a pocket and clicked the remote, causing a chest hatch to hiss open in the hulking mech.

"Hey...Derkin?"

"Yeah?"

The chest hatch was almost seamless and invisible when closed. Now, Black Jack's chest hung open in an almost lewd way, sleek internal cabin exposed for all the world to see. Unlike Lady Luck, this Walker wasn't built for a pilot to be mobile. In fact, it had no manual controls beyond a simple ejection-system pull lever. Black Jack's generation of Walkers were built solely for neural jacked pilots, itself a prototype technology. Bleeding Edge didn't even begin to describe it.

As Olliver grabbed onto the entry handles, Derkin helped him turn around, so that he could sit himself back into the single seat within his Walker. Sensing pressure, the seat began to inflate with a soft hum of internal pumps, until it hugged his back and shoulders like nothing he'd ever sat in before. Derkin was, at the same time, carefully trying to move Olly's casted leg into the padded slot designed for it.

The otter couldn't meet Derkin's eyes, which was, he figured, for the best. His Corpsman was concentrating on that damnable broken leg, and he wasn't about to let him get distracted. Once the leg was locked into place, though, and the pads began to swell up to encase it, he had no choice.

Golden orbs met his own, and after a second or two, Olliver's sense of embarrassment grew too strong, forcing his eyes down. Still, he pushed on with the intended topic of conversation, unwilling to let the awkward question drift aimlessly into nothing.

"What are we?"

The dillo cocked his head, triangular narrow face showing a quirked brow of curiosity. Olliver's eyes glanced up, then back down again, as his ears went red on the inside, and paws clenched and unclenched aimlessly atop his fatigue pants.

"Huh?"

The urge to make sarcastic comments about Derkin's oh-so-clever response lessened the awkwardness just enough. With a slight frown, Olly lifted his chin, and forced himself to meet eyes with the male, though his chest was doing flip-flops he suspected rightly belonged to his insensate gut.

"Are we...I mean. I haven't had a boyfriend in six years...Since the accident killed my last one."

"That accident?" Derkin touched Olly's chest, just above the spot where he couldn't feel a thing. The otter looked down, suddenly grateful for a place to look other than into the armadillo's eyes. His sleek, oily-furred paw moved, resting over top of his friend's scaly-fleshed paw.

"Yeah. We were...I'd just won some stupid championship or another. Pole-vault, I think. Anyway, we got a little drunk and...Uh...Doesn't matter, he died and I almost did."

The armadillo's other paw came up under Olly's chin, and forced it gently upward. There, just in front of him, Derkin's liquid gold eyes were full of a strange expression, something between a knowing look of sorrowful commiseration and a look of happiness.

"If I kiss you, are you going to hit me?"

Olliver blinked at him, startled by the question. Then, after a few seconds of deep thought, he leaned forward as much as the encapsulating seat allowed. Their lips touched, a gentler kiss than the hungry, probing, forceful ones they'd shared for the last week or so. The armadillo tilted his head, pressing deeper, sliding his tongue across the otter's lips and then past them as his muzzle opened with a panted breath.

The otter didn't fail to notice that even in the midst of their slowly more-passionate lip lock that his armadillo's paws were at work. Straps were tightened gently, buckles clicked into place, then a paw slid up his chest, tracing his muscular pecs.

Finally, the golden-eyed male pulled back, licking a drip of saliva off his otter's lips, a grin spread across his face.

"Am I your boyfriend, Olly? Is that what you're asking?"

The otter nodded, annoyed at his own sudden shyness after so long alone. Loneliness was an easy misery, in which he didn't have to think of others' feelings so much, or worry about his own safety. Now, going into such a risky action, it just seemed wrong somehow, not to know what they had between them.

"Yeah."

Derkin laughed lightly, softly, so the others upstairs couldn't hear.

"It sounds good to me. My term of service is up in two months, though I doubt they'll release me. When the war's done, maybe we can find a place together somewhere nice."

The otter looked up, as the butterflies in his chest began to settle into an odd warmth. His face hurt, and he realized it was from a clenched jaw, and how silly it was that he was nervous about his relationship status rather than the fiery hell they were maneuvering towards. The Whip laughed, too, joining Derkin's chuckles.

"Now be a good pilot and kill some badguys."

Pulling back, the dillo heaved his weight against the opened chest canopy. In moments, Olly went from seeing his boyfriend's smiling face to being locked in a strange, warm, comfortable darkness. Something in the back of his brain added the terms 'like my mother's womb', though of course he had no memory of it.

Then the jacks connected, where his spine met his skull, sliding automatically into the concealed ports there, and his world went briefly black as the system booted up.

Solomon Sign had been flying straight and stable, as two of the Fist's 10-vessel veteran fighter wings swooped in like striking hawks on the frigate's escort screen. With her adaptive camouflage active, Void Shadow only knew she was there by the green outline his sensors placed over the position of a known friendly. Likewise camouflaged, the squirrel in starfighter form grinned at the sense of exultation and power such invisibility lent him.

Explosions lit the void ahead of him, as the first fighter wing banked hard left to avoid a withering screen of desperate anti-fighter chaff that spewed from the frigate's port broadside cannons. Predictably, the frigate's fighter screen hurtled in to engage, slinging blasts of cerulean plasma pulses in their thousands at the rapidly-scattering formation.

Their second fighter wing banked right, then pulled hard turns to spin themselves upright like spindles hanging on threads, firing maneuvering thrusters to push their fighters directly up and over the frigate as it struggled to turn its axis and keep turrets on them. Meanwhile, they dumped prodigious hundreds of glimmering plasma and high-explosive rounds into their target as it blasted out millions of flak balls trying to swat them off.

Solomon Sign jerked hard right, a sudden movement that had Void Shadow instinctively banking left and scanning for foes, as a rail cannon round arced all too near to their position, the light anti-ship weapon aimed at some allied ship far to their rear. With a growl of annoyance, Void Shadow twisted himself in the void, releasing a cloaked missile on a parallel course to the frigate, so that when its cloaking died ten seconds later, it would appear to have come from one of the fighters. Though a single missile wouldn't make much difference, it just felt wrong to him to allow the insult of such an attack on his mate and team to go unanswered.

In moments, they were past the slow-spinning light capital ship, as it whirled its turrets, trying to fight off the swarm of expert pilots that were slowly nipping it apart like piranhas devouring a whale. Ahead of them, the great green-grey sphere of polluted Centauri VII loomed, growing rapidly larger to his jacked-in 'eyes'.

Their drop would take them past the day-line and into the night side of the planet, but at that moment they were staring down on its sun-lit side. What Void saw made his stomach sour, a sense that penetrated even the artificial world he lived in while jacked to the machine.

Huge black-grey smudges covered swathes of the planet's pollutant-green-grey surface, roiling like grease bubbles in water as entire cities burned. Even in the midst of a vast space battle, two of the enemy's cruisers were still sitting in geosynchronous orbit, highlighted in bright red by his sensors, pulsing off blasts of energy that burned down through the atmosphere to cause bright flashes down below.

"Orbital bombardment of civilian targets, Solo. What the fuck, man..."

"Yeah I know, Void. This is fucking disgusting. What say when we drop off our precious cargo, we go fuck up that cruiser's day?"

The idea of a transport and a fighter-bomber taking on such a megalithic vessel was purely laughable. Until Void Shadow realized, with a curly-edged sinister grin, that those two cruisers were strategic bombers - basically undefended except for fairly rudimentary point defense systems. Their fighter screens and escort ships were behind, thirty minutes away, part of the vast enemy flotilla.

"Heh heh, sounds good to me! And I thought it was my job to be the one full of bad ideas! Hehehehe!"

"Bad ideas and dangerously stupid ideas are not the same thing, Void." Randy Kerrick's voice was drab, all dry humor only his boyfriend would understand wasn't truly criticism. For all his bitching, Void knew the lizard loved his antics.

"Pff! Alright, enough screwing around, let's get the ground-pounders set down safe. You have the flight path?"

"Yeah. Only I think there's triple-A down there somewhere. See those contrails?"

Randy had always possessed superior eyes, and Void realized with amazement that they were good enough to even surpass his sensors' visual acuity. Little red dots were scudding across his vision, now that he looked for them, and the external cameras on his nano-metallic hull began zooming in and contextually searching.

Sure enough, there must have still been some resistance left on the ground. Mobile anti-aircraft guns were spitting out enormous gouts of good old fashioned explosive lead ordnance trying to bat down skittering shapes, scattered flyers his sensors were outlining in blue as allied units.

Even Randy's great eyes, though, couldn't match Void Shadow's ability to magnify images through the use of camera lenses and sensors. With a quick mental command, he linked up with Solomon Sign's on-board computers, and began feeding him detailed information on how to modify the flight path to avoid blind-firing batteries.

"What do you think, Void? Truck-based?"

"Yeah, probably. I've got thermal imaging only, too much smoke and smog to be completely sure. Want me to make a sweep before you go in?"

His partner paused for a moment, likely calculating the odds of seeing his boyfriend go down in flaming bits.

"No. Stay close, and pot-shot anything that starts pointing our way. No sense in risking both of us individually when they're ripping open the sky like that."

"Shit, Solo...This is going to get bad."

"What else did we sign up for? Dragonslayers do tend to get a little scorched, Void."