by Aer-ki Jyr
Davis sighed. “I’m still half expecting him to crash and burn.”
“It’s been seven years,” Wilson countered.
“Call me a pessimist, then.”
“Ha,” Wilson laughed. “You, a pessimist?” he said, spreading his arms wide, gesturing to the city they stood in. “All of this says otherwise.”
“Well, it is raining,” Davis pointed out.
2
The next day…
“Down on your left…” Randy said over the comlink, “…in the rocks.”
“On it,” Jason said, tilting his skeet to port while kicking up the vertical jets to gain more altitude. As his T-shaped aircraft rose up over the ridgeline a small outpost came into view, with a pair of turrets guarding a small helipad. One was pointed away, the other to the right. Both began to swivel around to target Jason’s skeet as soon as he came into view.
He fired a charged up laser shot into the nearest one, hitting it just below the twin barrels swinging into alignment, but not destroying it. Jason managed one more shot then rolled to starboard and ducked back down into the valley, skimming over the angled rock wall and dropping out of the turrets’ line of sight.
“Stay low,” Randy said, spotting from his skeet circling high above the simulated battlefield. “The terrain dips after the next bend right in front of the turrets.”
“Trench skimming as ordered,” Jason acknowledged, dropping his skeet down over the bottom of the valley and the perfectly flat stream running through it. He slowed his forward speed and added thrust to the three vertical jets, located within on each prong of the ‘T’ in the narrow fuselage. The wingtip engines continued to pull the skeet forward through the valley in a slow hover, staying low and safely out of sight as he rounded the bend.
“Get ready,” Randy advised as two more skeets were approaching the outpost from opposite directions perpendicular to Jason’s position.
Laying belly down within the skeet’s simulator cockpit, Jason glanced up at the charge indicators for his primary and only weapon on the aircraft. Both capacitors were reading full charge, meaning he’d get two shots before having to wait out a brief period for the skeet’s fuel cells to supply enough power to refill the power reservoirs that fed the nose-mounted laser.
“Now!” Randy half yelled into the comlink.
Jason pressed down the pedal behind his right foot at the back of the straddle-couch he was ‘riding’ like a motorcycle. His chest was pressed flat against the slight forward incline of the pads while his legs were hanging over the sides slightly with his feet pressed back against the throttle controls.
Both wingtip jets kicked up their fan blades and pulled the skeet forward while Jason used the right joystick to alter the engine balance and spin the aircraft to the left with the help of a small fan blade in the tail, pointing the clear nosecone toward the rocky wall of the canyon. When he neared a collision, Jason jammed his left foot back hard and kicked in the vertical engines at maximum thrust, launching his skeet up along the angled wall towards the outpost.
Thanks to Randy’s timing, Jason was halfway up the canyon when Paul and Kip’s skeets crisscrossed overtop the outpost, firing off both capacitor charges into the turret and missing each other by a few meters before pulling up and rolling evasively. The turrets tracked them and fired multiple chain gun spurts in their wake as the fighters danced across the sky then ducked back down into the vast canyon network.
The outpost suddenly flashed into view at almost point blank range as Jason came up over the edge and found himself face to face with one of the turrets…which was still tracking his teammates and pointed away to the right. Jason emptied both capacitors after quickly cutting his forward thrust and managing a sloppy hover barely 50 meters away. His precision firing, thanks to a small swivel angle on the laser mount, hit the turret in the cupola where the gun barrels extended and not the concrete shell below that was already showing a large hole thanks to the strafing run.
The invisible laser shots cored through the thin armor plates, as well as melting the base of the left barrel, continuing inside and penetrating the magazine. Several rounds exploded from the laser-induced heat and popped the top of the turret off in a muffled explosion.
Before the second turret could swing around and bathe him in tungsten rounds, Jason reversed the direction of the idling wingtip engines with a flick of a hand switch and pressed down hard on the right foot pedal, launching him backwards into the canyon. He eased up the pressure on his left foot pedal and sank back down out of sight as the remaining pot marked turret swung around to fire on him.
As it did so Ivan, Kip, and Megan’s skeets came in from behind, fired, then peeled off in a variety of arcs, all staying away from a straight passover which would have placed them directly in the turret’s firing arc.
Simulated concrete blew apart and a sizeable hole appeared in the armored cap of the turret, but its barrels still swung about, trying to track Megan as Paul circled back around and made a second, more precise strafing run. His single shot hit one of the barrels and when the turret tried to fire on him as he passed nearly straight over the target and rose up spinning into the sky, its slagged barrel reacted poorly to the rounds trying to pour through and detonated the top of the turret in a shower of debris.
“Second turret destroyed,” Randy reported. “Convoy clear to proceed.”
“Convoy acknowledges,” one of the trainers in the control room replied. “Proceeding to next waypoint.”
Randy glanced down at the small digital display situated between joysticks and saw a small line of dots start to move again up the road that led past the outpost they’d just neutralized.
“Heads up 2s,” Emily’s voice said over the comlink. “We’ve got incoming. Six VTOLs from the northwest.”
“We’ve got them,” Dan said as he, Brian, and Jack accelerated towards the targets. “Stick with the convoy. They may be trying to distract us again.”
“Six on three isn’t good odds,” Jason said, lifting up out of the canyon. “Paul, let’s go.”
“Already ahead of you.”
“Good luck,” Megan said, splitting off from Paul and heading back to Emily and the convoy with Ivan and Kip.
“Split them up,” Randy said, still in his high altitude observation position.
Dan and Brian drifted to the left in response, Jack to the right, but the incoming helicopter gunships didn’t alter their straight-line trajectory towards the convoy.
“Ok…” Randy commented. “That’s new.”
Paul glanced down at his navigational display, seeing his fellow skeets as small blue dots and the approaching VTOLS as red squares just as a yellow blip appeared between them…then two more.
“Missile turret!” Paul yelled as he accelerated to full speed and dipped low to the ground and dropped into one of the canyons.
The missile tracking him lost contact and continued on a straight trajectory trying to reacquire the signal, passing 100 meters over his head as he hovered up against a steep rock wall. Twelve seconds later it ran out of fuel and fell from the sky.
“Report!” he asked as he rose up out of his hover and started getting some lateral speed down the canyon before he popped back up into view.
“Turret down,” Jason reported. “Randy got it, but the VTOLs are on top of us.”
“Copy that,” Paul said, seeing the red squares reappear as he cleared the top of the canyon wall. They were broken up and moving about like a swarm of bees along with the now five blue dots…one of which winked out.
“Dan’s down,” Brian reported. “They’ve got seekers.”
“Damn it,” Paul swore in a whisper as he approached the aerial brawl. The skeets were maneuverable enough to avoid the straight firing missiles, but the ones that could home in on the target were hard to evade.
“You want help?” Megan asked.
“No, stay put,” Jason immediately responded. “We’ve got this,” he said, firing on one of the VTOLs from
the flank as it fired a pair of missiles at Jack. The rear rotor disintegrated and the gunship fell in a chaotic spiral from the sky.
Jack pulled up immediately, then just as the missiles redirected he slapped his skeet back down hard, causing the missiles to overshoot by a handful of meters…but after they passed by they arced around in a long curve and continued to pursue him, catching up rapidly.
Now behind him, he knew he didn’t have a chance of causing them to overshoot again, so he accelerated hard towards the nearest VTOL, fired one shot at it, then flew underneath it as close as he could, causing one of the pursuing missiles to hit the friendly target.
The other missile missed and hit Jack’s skeet in the tail, blowing it into simulated bits and causing him to careen out of the sky, but before he hit the ground he managed to kick up his vertical thrust and partially null out the list. Limping heavily, his skeet wobbled its way down into a canyon and disappeared from the rest of the 2s’ scanners.
Sitting in a slow moving hover near the convoy, Emily’s sensor board suddenly lit up with two additional contacts far from the combat and directly ahead of the convoy.
“There,” she said, feeling vindicated at having resisted the urge to fly out and help her teammates. “Two VTOLs.”
“And tanks,” Kip noted as four small triangles appeared on the road ahead, about 3 kilometers up the road from the convoy, coming out of a hidden base just prior to the LZ they were heading to.
“Kip, take the tanks,” Megan said, already accelerating ahead of the convoy. “Emily, Ivan…you’re with me. Get those choppers before they get within firing range.”
“Lefty first,” Emily said, quickly closing on the not so far off targets, which immediately sprouted missile plumes.
Ivan went to the deck, ducking down into the safety of the terrain while Emily peeled off to the left and ran along the ridgeline, pulling the missiles her way momentarily before ducking down as well, leaving Megan with a free run at the VTOLs. She fired both shots into the left chopper, downing its lightly armored bulk with a pyre of smoke pouring from its slagged engine compartment.
Ivan popped back up into view, much closer than where he’d disappeared, and shot the second VTOL, hitting it twice in the bow, knocking out one of its missile launches, but not taking it out of the fight. Emily took care of that a moment later, then got her hull clipped by a shower of tungsten shrapnel from the hidden base.
“Turret!” she announced, still flight worthy but with a reduction in electrical power. The shrapnel must have hit one of her 3 power cells.
“I’m on it,” Ivan said, heading that direction along with Megan.
“Tanks first,” Kip reminded them. “They’ve got heavy armor.”
“Right,” Megan said to herself as she reversed course. Only one of the four triangles had disappeared from the display screen.
3
The road through the canyons was partially obscured by rocks and trees, but was open from directly above and Megan could see Kip making another strafing run against the tanks. They returned fire with short range automatic weapons, but otherwise didn’t stand much of a chance against the skeets…if they were careful enough about not getting too close. The tanks were, however, a major threat to the convoy, which was now less than a kilometer away and closing fast.
Megan flew up from behind the tanks, flying over the carcass of the destroyed one and passing by Kip as he finished his strafing run. She held off fire on the rear tank and the middle one, then emptied both laser blasts into the first, hoping to add to the damage Kip had already done.
Smoke filled the air above the first tank, but it did not stop moving as Megan flew past and began a long circle to come around again after her capacitors recharged. It did, however, mark the position of the tanks with a black plume coming up out of the trees, making it easy for Ivan and Emily to see where they were without having to rely on the intermittent sensor screen.
Ivan raced forward and finished off the first tank, delaying the others as they had to move around and/or dislodge it to get past. Emily, on reduced power, flew up slowly from behind and shot the rear tank, daring it to turn around. Its machine gun turret swiveled about slowly, forcing Emily to fly off over the trees before she could fire a second salvo.
Her first shots had melted through the armor on impact, but only a hole the size of a fingernail, exploding out some of the surrounding armor but not hitting anything vital inside. Trouble was, with an impact point so small, it was virtually impossible to retarget the same hole, and thankfully the skeets’ lasers were powerful enough to penetrate on one shot, else the tanks would have been next to impregnable.
“Anyone know where the best place is to shoot these things?” Megan asked, not all that familiar with the interior design.
“Go for the treads,” Kip responded. “Easiest way to slow them down.”
Megan took his suggestion and aimed for the port side of the frontmost tank on her next pass. Her first shot hit the armor plating, melted through, and did a small amount of damage to the rotating metallic treads beneath. Her second shot did better a few meters aft, suddenly causing the tank to seize up and twist to the side.
“Good advice,” she said, thanking Kip, “but we’re out of time. The convoy is almost in range.”
“Tell them to hold up,” Ivan suggested, shooting the first tank in the ‘head’ as the second one passed it by.
“They won’t do that,” Megan complained. “Once in motion the convoy doesn’t stop until the next waypoint.”
“They would if this were real,” Ivan argued. “They’re just being stubborn.”
“And we’re about to lose,” Emily reminded them, shooting the back tread of the now lead tank, then pulling up out of sight before she literally ran over the second, sitting in place on the road with both its weapons still intact. Machine gun fire followed in her wake.
“Not today,” Jason’s voice interrupted as he and three other skeets flew in from the north and angled around as a group for a strafing run, passing over the lead convoy vehicle just before they fired into the enemy tank. Eight shots went into its armored head, some of which hit the internal magazine. The top of the tank popped off like a child’s toy in the resulting explosion and fell into the trees beside the road.
“One left,” Emily reminded them, hovering back into view and firing off a single shot into the aft of the tank with no effect.
Megan and Kip came around and skewered it again, but it wasn’t until Ivan’s pass that the last of the small triangles winked out. Thirty seconds later the convoy snaked its way into view and skirted around the edge of the smoking hulk.
“Did someone say something about a turret?” Paul asked.
“Up ahead, tucked into the terrain,” Emily reported. “Hard to see.”
“Randy?” Jason prompted.
“Climbing,” he said, getting back up to his previous aerial perch. “Alright, I’ve got it. Just looks like one this time. Best approach is from the west.”
“ETA?” Paul asked.
“Looks like about 2 minutes,” Megan guessed.
Paul smiled. “Any other targets, Randy?” he asked as the others were already pulling hard towards the west.
“Nothing on the board…the LZ looks clear.”
“Copy that,” Paul said, heading off with the others but gaining some altitude as well so he could keep an eye out for surprises as his team quickly took care of the last threat to the convoy.
A few minutes later the simulation ended and Paul’s cockpit screens went blank blue, indicating a successfully completed challenge. Their scoring stats flashed up in a grid, which he studied for a moment before lifting the top hatch and climbing off the pommel that he’d been riding for the past 45 minutes.
“Ouch,” he muttered, stretching a bit when his feet hit the floor. Dan was waiting for them in the center of the simulation room as the rest of the team climbed out of their individual capsules.
“And?” he asked.
“We won…but our score wasn’t the greatest,” Paul answered.
“I agree,” Jason echoed. “I think we need to try again tomorrow.”
“Should be able to scrape up an extra 100 points if we don’t get sloppy,” Emily added, cracking her neck loudly. “Jack, how did you not go down?”
“Guess you don’t actually need a tail to fly,” he said, walking up to the semi-circle they were forming in the center of the room…typical 2s’ post-challenge debrief. “I kept it off the ground, but couldn’t do much more than float and sputter.”
“That avoided a penalty,” Randy pointed out.
“The 7s were what, 30 points better?” Megan asked.
“34,” Jason answered, “but the 6s haven’t gone yet, and I don’t want to spot them an easy score to match.”
“Tomorrow it is then,” Brian confirmed for everyone, checking his wristwatch. “We’ve still got 35 minutes before training session 2. I’m going to go grab a snack, unless you want to hit the gauntlet run again?”
“I think we’ve had enough seat time today,” Jason admitted, feeling a bit saddle sore. It’d only been two weeks since they’d been introduced to the skeets and their unusual seats, and none of them had quite gotten comfortable with them yet.
“Well, see ya,” Brian said, heading out of the simulation room and to the nearest of the 24 hour cafeterias that served the population of Atlantis, which had been growing steadily with each passing month. At present, the city was about 75% staffed, but the population would more than double when Atlantis went fully online and accessible to the public as Star Force’s primary spaceport, as well as a tourist resort and mid-Pacific transport hub.
Paul and the others broke up, each heading off on their own errands. His morning training session had been spent on hand to hand sparring with Morros, one of the busiest of the martial arts instructors, so Paul headed over to the track to get in his daily run. When he arrived there were eight other trainees already running laps, most of which he never usually crossed paths with. He looked at who was available and sized them up by what he knew of their speed scores, then jumped into the flow running alongside Morgan, who was about dead even with him in the running challenges.