13:21 September 24th, 1645 AC Batavian Standard Meridian Date TimeTempest-C type Starfighter, air group of Strike Cruiser HMCS Starlight
The moment stretched and Cassandra felt as if something inside of her dropped straight through the cockpit of her starfighter. It was as if time itself had frozen for a moment, as a brilliant flash of radiation exploded right beside HMCS Starlight, drowning out the battlespace before the comms network winked out of existence in front of her.
She had a sense that there was something terribly wrong with the situation, but she never thought her hunch would wind up being anything other than paranoia. Her breath caught in her throat, her breathing turning into ragged and shallow gasps as she felt her heart thunder underneath her chest.
It didn’t help that she could feel the emotions of her WSO, Magellan, bleeding through their Ghost feed. This is all wrong, completely wrong…! her mind screamed as her vision became bright and unfocused. She felt like she was pulling a hundred Gs, even though a distant part of her knew that she hadn’t moved far from the refpoint…
She let out a shuddering gasp as she felt her flight suit inject her with a dose of stimulants, but it felt like an eternity before her eyes refocused. It was another eternity before she heard the radio chatter slowly filter through the fading ringing in her ears.
Lieutenant Commander Cassandra van Ness clenched her teeth as the world seemed to sharpen, while her fighter’s sensors slowly rebooted, onboard systems bypassing shorted components and discarding faulty readings, until the cockpit finally came back to life in a flurry of flickering lights.
If it weren’t for the stimulants, Cassandra was definitely sure she would’ve frozen again.
The massive bulk of the civilian freighter CS Antigone was nothing more than a rapidly expanding debris field, while Starlight was leaking vapour and atmosphere into the void of space, its mighty hull speckled with gashes, but most of the damage was concentrated along most of her sensor arrays.
She was blind and bleeding, and Cassie’s heart clenched at the thought of her home being murdered at the hands of these pirates.
“Impact! Impact on the Starlight!”
The voices over comms were fractured, buried under the fading aftershock-static of the EM wave. She took a steading breath as her Ghost flickered and dispassionately filled her vision about the damage the Anthony Fokker-class Strike Cruiser had sustained.
Cassandra banked her fighter away from the battered ship. She had to rejoin the fight.
“We’ve got—” Magellan began to talk before her own training kicked in. “Seraph! They’re jamming us, local comms only!”
“Order the rest of the group to form up on us. We’re moving in,” Cassandra said, as she pushed the throttles forward and raced her starfighter towards the survivors of Starlight’s air wing. Out of the corner of her vision, she saw the rest of the Tempests in her fighter group form up on her left as she charged into hell.
The fractured picture of the battlespace slowly cleared up as her starfighter fought through the last echoes of the pulse weapon the pirates had used in the ambush. Things still weren’t clear, but with both her Ghost-link with Magellan and the sensor data from the rest of the fighter screen that was still screening Starlight, she managed to rebuild her situational awareness on her HUD.
She felt her hands clench around the controls of her starfighter. The distress call was a trap, made to lure Starlight and the rest of the Navy in close enough to cripple it with a large detonation. That itself was clear, even if the status of their ship wasn’t.
To make matters worse were the massive clouds of markers rising from the two pirate Q-Ships surrounding the boarded CS Fram, which itself turned out to also be a Q-Ship as well. Massive panels explosively detached from the hull of the erstwhile civilian ship, disgorging fighters from the launch deck.
The two Q-Ships’ icons flashed as Magellan flagged them as high priority; they were burning bright towards the crippled Starlight and her air wing, and Cassandra let out a stream of curses as those two ships launched a wall of interceptor missiles towards the rest of the air wing and the marine dropships they were covering—and her. She could still feel the sharp, biting feeling of panic transmitted alongside the Ghost-link as she sent out her orders.
“You can’t be serious, Seraph…!” Magellan cried out. “That’s just insane, if they are tearing red and blue to shreds, what can we do?”
“If we sit still, we are all dead,” Cassandra bit out as her senses danced over the sensor readouts. “Focus on ECM, flick the Starfires over to me and try to get a hold of the AWACS,” Cassandra ordered as they accelerated towards the chaotic mess in front of the pirate formation.
The main portion of Starlight’s air wing engaged the threat in a desperate dagger dance, as the wingman drones accompanying them screamed into the incoming missiles, filling the void around Cassandra and the other pilots with fragments and bursts of radiation.
The first few missiles to survive the suicidally desperate defense had their electronic brains fooled by sensor ghosts and noise, but even though the vacuum was crammed full of EM radiation and debris there were just far too many to evade.
One after another, friendly IFF signatures flickered out of existence, including that of her CO. She heard a gasp of shock from Magellan, mixing with her own feeling of helplessness as they did their best to help the fading group of friendlies. The Tempest’s engines roared behind her as she and Magellan made a mad dash for the enemy, blasting past the two marine dropships desperately flying back to the Strike Cruiser.
Everything she had learned in her training told her that what she was doing right now was the utter height of recklessness. It was foolhardy, it was pointless. This was insanity, just like Magellan said.
But they had to do something, anything to stem the tide…!
And then something flickered on her sensors.
“Magellan, give me remote control of the munitions left on our wrecks in the battlespace!” She said as she saw the cluster of enemy fighters. Her Ghost helpfully identified them as more modern Corsair type starfighters as they blazed towards them.
“All of them!?”
“Yes!” Cassandra shouted.
“Copy! Flicking them over.”
Faint feeling of hope, Cassandra thought for a fleeting moment as the enemy starfighters closed in. The universe shrunk to her surroundings as in just a few fragments of a moment, she calculated the vectors and distances in tandem with her Tempest’s data core.
“Fox Three!” she announced as they returned the favour to the enemy formation with a missile barrage of their own. The radiant lances of her own missiles twinkled in her vision like miniature suns as they shot towards the enemy starfighters. They made their own futile attempts at evading the onslaught, but as the explosions and bursts of radiation faded from her Tempest’s screens, there was nothing left except for rapidly cooling fragments and dust.
And then past that, the true target.
Magellan’s rapid-fire battle chatter faded away as CS Fram’s blocky bulk was right in front of her.
“Seraph! Are you trying to kill us?!” she heard Magellan shouting at her.
It didn’t matter. She had to make this work.
She took control of two wingman drones and blazed ahead with them, firing her lance and kinetic impactors alike while guiding the drones on a collision course. The crew of Fram quickly recognized her plan and began to turn, but at what some fighter manuals call ‘literally knife-fighting range’ it was too late for the bulky cargo ship.
The drones plowed straight into the center of the ship, and with a burst of water vapour and oxygen rushing out of Fram’s pierced hull heralding their imminent doom, two massive plumes of fire erupted from the gaping wounds as explosions and bursts of radiation scythed through the improvised pirate carrier’s form.
For a second Cassandra felt at ease, her taut nerves loosening as if a weight disappeared from her shoulders.
She did it.
She did it.
But then the blast caught her own fighter. In that moment ice shot down her spine, her augmented senses automatically shunting itself from the fighter’s electronic eyes as the hard radiation overwhelmed the fighter and completely shut it down again.
Everything spun, the world blurry and unfocused, until darkness was all she could see. She could still feel Magellan behind her, but the comforting presence of her ghost went silent. She didn’t know if it was just shock, or worse…
And when she shook herself alert, she was alone.
Terrifyingly alone in the emptiness of the void.
“You killed me! You killed us all!” the bleeding and deathly pale face in front of her accused her, the radiation-ravaged empty eye sockets glaring into her soul.
The panic returned, flaring brighter than any other feeling as her heart threatened to pound out of her chest.
She knew this wasn’t possible. Every rational part of her mind was screaming at her that this was not real. She was in a starfighter floating adrift across the void. When the rescue crews found her, she was unconscious. There was no way that she could have known the cost of her victory. She would never let anyone, especially a dead man, hold this over her.
But an overwhelming sense of guilt and unease still told her that Commander Rundervoord was right.