Quoted By:
There is a certain pattern to ambushes – a regularity that emerges after you suffer from them enough times to begin inflicting them upon others.
It happens exactly how you remember: the crescendo of clarification requests and panicked comms chatter. The dreaded knowledge – just minutes or seconds too late – that there is no accident here, and the ships bound for yours are neither confused nor mistaken.
You see precisely when the enemy fleet arrives at this realization.
<…WATCHER engaging…>
The interceptor trio serving as your sortie vanguard runs its engines hot, spearing plasma into your view-screens as it accelerates at an inhuman rate. Two interceptors break on flanking trajectories, while their terse commander overshoots before cutting thrust and pirouetting backwards. An isolated group of enemy fighters are caught in the maneuver. Pulsed laser fire flickers aquamarine-blue as it disarticulates three ships into metallic shrapnel.
Several thousand kilometers distant, a pair of support fighters join by engaging with focused particle weaponry. Although the beams are invisible during transit, you see them cleave through the last remaining fighter – the sign of combusting metal and decomposing ceramic flare-bright through your viewscreen.
<…painting by numbers..>
<…good tone…>
Behind them, the bulk of your sortie converges towards the trio of light carriers, which have already begun to open their narrow launch bays to scramble strike craft. Your pilots deny them the opportunity. A pair of support fighters piloted by a particularly eager crew-clade illuminate the frontrunner with targeting lasers. In response, two bomber contingents launch a brace of heavy missiles, their blunt-nosed warheads reducing the carrier into a field of thinning debris.
The second carrier is marginally more fortunate. Clustered railgun slugs from your last bomber group streak through the engine compartment, sending the ship into a slow tumble. A moment later, a heavier slug from the SOLSTICE’s dorsal railgun shatters against the ship’s superstructure. Pressurized air streams into space as the carrier lists, barely managing to stay operational.
As you consider your next targets amid a burning sky, you feel an old, almost nostalgic joy. It is a feeling jealously reserved for machines, or perhaps those who once lived as machines. The joy of execution – of fulfilling a well-defined function without knowing what it serves. You chide yourself for enjoying it, but bask in it all the same.