to be poetic.”
Dash smiled then as an idea took hold. “We could use a little poetry out here. Hey, do you think if I got them a recipe, they could make donuts?”
Dash had to admit, the new Perseid mechs were fast.
Their Blur drives—still overpowered for the mass of the mech, even after being scaled back—were able to accelerate them right to the limits of the inertial dampers. Dash had Sentinel clock Dawes as he drove his Perseid as hard as he could, to the point where the dampers weren’t quite enough to stave off the full effects of such a potent burst of acceleration. It came to almost eighty g’s, where most ships capped out in the forty to fifty g range. Even the Archetype, as powerful as its drive was, could only manage sixty, and maybe sixty-five in an emergency. It made the little Perseids the most fleeting of targets, able to alter their trajectories faster than the nimble Mako fighters.
“Firing solution doesn’t get better than about seventy percent confidence.” Dash watched the tactical display. The Perseids’ maneuver cone—the region of space through which it could conceivably maneuver, over time—sprawled across the display, ridiculously big. He had Sentinel use the comm laser with the dark-lance’s fire controller to try to land digital hits on Dawes, but he only managed to do so about half the time.
“How was that, Dash?” Dawes called, decelerating his mech to a stop relative to Kayley’s Perseid and the Archetype, then zooming back to join them.
“It was good,” Dash said. But as good as it was, there was still a problem.
“One hit out of two is way better than we usually do. Hell, the Archetype’s nowhere near that.”
“We’ve been hit by seventy-one percent of the shots fired at us,” Sentinel put in.
“You keep track of that?”
“I keep track of everything.”
“Good to know. I like that kind of data. Okay, a point we should probably discuss. The difference is that the Archetype can take the hits. You guys really can’t.”
“I heard you had its arm get blown off, and you just kept fighting.” There was a hint of awe in Kayley’s voice.
“You might be there one day.” Dash made his tone light. The reality of a near-fatal hit still echoed in his senses, and he had to focus on the young pilots, leaving the event behind. “But that’s the point. You guys pretty much have paper and luck for armor, so you need to avoid getting hit in the first place. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.”
Dash spent the next hour encouraging Kayley and Dawes to lean hard into their ability to maneuver preternaturally fast. He took them through a series of mini exercises between the Black Gate—which was currently dormant—and the majestic sweep of Guardian. He deliberately brought them in closer and closer to the bustle of drones working on the station. As a safety measure, he had Ragsdale call in all of the manned tugs and other construction craft. He then had his two students jink and maneuver among the working drones.
“A battle can be a real furball, as the Mako and Denkiller pilots call it,” Dash said. “Just a mess. No point being able to maneuver if you’re just going to collide with other things. An impact is still an impact.”
By the time they were done, they’d improved the hit ratio for the Perseids to about forty-five percent of incoming shots—better, but still not good enough.
“Yeah, you guys are going to have to keep working on that. I’ll have Sentinel draft up a training program for you and share it with your AIs, so you can keep training.”
“Roger that,” Kayley replied, her voice more confident than earlier in the session.
“Dash,” Sentinel said. “The AI aboard each of the Perseids are new versions. They were derived from versions specifically designed to control light mechs, originally maintained in the Creators’ data-stores.”
“Okay. Are they stable?”
“I will let them speak to you.”
“Alright, put them on.” Dash’s curiosity was piqued.
A new voice came on the comm, crisp and precise. “Messenger, I am Rosco, the AI aboard Kayley’s Perseid.”
“Rosco? The Unseen named an AI Rosco?”
“No. Amy, who oversaw the Perseid program, allowed the pilots of the Perseids to name their AIs themselves,” Sentinel said.
“Yeah, she would. Classic Amy. But still, Rosco?”
“Rosco was my dog’s name,” Kayley said.
“Okay. A good name, then. Go ahead, er, Rosco,” Dash said.
“We are concerned. Our programming was designed to accommodate battle against the Golden. To that end, we are optimized for such combat,