Angel Flight

Durango

They say the best way to fight is to help someone walk into a trap you set for them. Then you can defeat them on your own timetable. Me, I've never liked other people's timetables. I plan to live forever, so I make it my business to mess with any plans that might go against it. I guess you could say that I'm just not a very obliging trapee. I will always fight to break out of your trap. That is my promise.

Durango

The sky was afire with the blaze of dying missiles. They died in their hundreds, exploding as they reached the line of death drawn by the point defense networks of the Western Alliance's Third Fleet. Missiles, lasers, and gravitic cannons reached out, blotting the Shang attack from the stars with merciless abandon. Anything less than Third Fleet would be taking damage already, and maybe worse. He frowned at the thought. There really were a lot of missiles here. Too many missiles for this to be some random attack.

"You know what comes to mind when I look at all that?" Jack asked.

Betty sighed and raised one eyebrow at him. She knew him too well. "Don't say it."

Jack aimed an impish smile at her. "It's a trap."

"You said it," she returned with an exasperated sigh.

Jack shrugged at her. "I couldn't resist."

"Well, you should have."

Jack chuckled at her and looked back to the wall of death. If there was one thing that spectacular waste of missiles was good for, it was making a real eye-catching example of modern art.

"At least we're good enough to take it," Betty continued, dismissing the threat with all the contempt a computer could bring for someone who started a battle they could not win.

"Yeah," Jack said, his tone doubtful. Eye-catching. Something about that had his subconscious in a whirl. He just didn't know what.

"What?" Betty asked in a worried town.

"I don't know." Jack frowned and tried to nail down the odd feeling. It's not like they were in danger. With the fleet arrayed for battle, no conceivable missile barrage could possibly break through. Even after he broadened his horizons to the idea of conceivable after seeing the current attack. Third Fleet was the largest collection of warships ever assembled. There was just no way to break them.

From that flank.

The thought came fully formed in Jack's mind and he returned Betty's gaze. She cocked her head to the side, aware of the change in his demeanor. Jack considered the idea for a second, and then nodded. "It comes to mind that if I wanted to sucker punch someone, I'd show them a very powerful and slow punch," he explained, pausing long enough for her to nod in understanding. "Then I'd wait for them to block it and stab them in the back," Jack finished.

Betty raised an eyebrow at him. "You know you're mixing metaphors, right?"

"Yeah, but it still tracks, right?"

She sighed. "Yeah, it does. What are you thinking?"

"This isn't their only play." Jack looked at the displays for several seconds, trying to figure out what his subconscious was telling him. He had a feeling that he needed to be elsewhere, but he didn't know where.

It was one of the many things that gave him an advantage over every normal human born on Earth since the dawn of time. The Peloran Treatments, given free of charge to every child, improved the power and intelligence of the body's immune system, effectively making sickness a literal thing of the past. The later treatments also slowed the aging process through some process Jack didn't understand. The closest explanation he'd ever figured out was that they somehow maintained a backup set of directions on how each cell in the human body was supposed to look. It kept the cells from degrading over time, and expanded the standard human lifespan into the centuries.