ship nearby went up in a series of flashes, its shield going down, and then the ship itself exploded. Elsewhere, stray destructor fire detonated against asteroids, flashing before being consumed by the vacuum.
“You’re using live fire?” I demanded. “During a testing exercise?”
No reply came from Flight Command. My hands grew tense on my controls, and my heart started racing. Suddenly the context of this entire fight changed.
“Scud,” I said. “What is wrong with these people? They complain about aggression, then send fully armed drones against a bunch of half-trained hopefuls?”
“I think,” M-Bot said, “maybe the Superiority might not be very nice.”
“What led you to that brilliant deduction?” I said, grunting and spinning my ship in a light-lance pivot around an asteroid. Above, three Krell drones swarmed down through the field, targeting me.
Calm, I told myself. You know how to do this. I moved by instinct, boosting a little faster and judging the drones’ attack strategy. Two stayed on my tail while one sped up and cut to the right, trying to get ahead of me.
I didn’t rely on my cytonic senses to read the drones’ instructions—I didn’t want to show off that I knew how to do that—and instead piloted normally. I cut to the side, spearing an asteroid with my light-lance and spinning around it before letting go at just the right moment to send me hurtling back toward the drones. I held my fire though. As we passed each other, I performed another pivot, darting after them.
This put me behind them. Normally, my job would be to chase these two back toward where Kimmalyn would be waiting to pick them off. Today, I’d need to do it all myself. I started firing on the drones, but they split apart, heading different directions. I chose one and dodged after it.
“I’m tracking the other two,” M-Bot said. “They’re weaving back this way, but it’s slow-going through the asteroids.”
I nodded, focused almost entirely on the chase after this drone. It cut downward, and I was able to anticipate it, darting parallel to it. I waited for it to turn again, and at exactly the right moment I launched my light-lance and speared the enemy ship. Quickly, before it could tug me off course, I shot the other end of the light-lance into a nearby asteroid.
The result was that the enemy ship unexpectedly found itself tethered to an asteroid. When it turned, it was yanked off course by the lance, and slammed into the asteroid in a spray of sparks. Hope you were watching that, Cuna, I thought with a grin of satisfaction.
“Well done,” M-Bot said. “Nearest enemy is at your eight. Highlighting on proximity display.”
I followed his suggestion, making a set of maneuvers that took me into a denser section of the asteroid field. Enormous rocks tumbled in space there, shadows playing across them under the floodlights of my ship. M-Bot helpfully changed his proximity screen to a 3-D hologram that showed a hovering scale map of the field, which rotated as I turned.
I managed to get behind one of the other Krell, but the third one—the one that had gone around to the outside direction—fell in behind me. Destructor blasts flashed around me and smashed the stones, spraying chips through the void. Debris popped against my shield.
“Engaging synthetic auditory indicators,” M-Bot said, and the soundlessness of space was replaced by rattling and explosions, reproduced to remind me of an in-atmosphere battle. I took this in—the sight of the asteroids, the feel of the explosions, the cold readouts, and the thundering of my own heart—and I grinned.
This was what life was about.
I spun through the asteroids, giving up the chase, and let both drones get on my tail. Then I led them in a sweeping game. Dodging, light-lancing, staying just ahead of them. Explosions rained around me. It was pure combat. My skill against that of the pilots, flying the drones from the safety of wherever they were holed up.
The explosions from other parts of the battlefield showed me for certain how little the diones and the Krell regarded the lives of anyone they considered beneath them. True, it did seem that most of the time they gave ships a chance to surrender if their shield went down. Many did just this—in fact, many gave up even before losing their shields.
It was difficult to be that precise with live fire, however, and some unfortunate ships took a stray shot just after their shield failed. Those didn’t get a chance to surrender.