Cadet Flight Methuselah

012

Running her right hand over a few predesignated commands Nim locked onto Seig's transponder signal, making it the reference point for her distance information instead of the Heinlein. It was pretty unlikely she'd loose sight of her own ship when his marauder was only sitting a kilometer forward of the bridge. If she did, well... she was an idiot and deserved to die an icy cold death. "Shunt me the sensor data, all of it, now."

"Piping your VTI everything we've got, Riptide," said Calli in a bitterly determined voice. Whether she was focused or just really pissed at her because she was about to do something suicidal was hard to tell.

Nim watched as her display exploded with hundreds of little red and blue dots of information, almost like someone had just slung a handful of patriotic confetti across her screen. CIC normally filtered out all the information on the debris too small to cause disabling damage to fighters, sending out only information on the really large chunks that needed to be avoided at all cost. Everything else was registered and sifted through by the fighter's onboard VTI based on how far away it was from the ship itself and whether or not it was on a course that crossed her own. Now everything in the whole of the defined battlesphere was showing up in her screens, and the debris field between the Heinlein and Hostile One was dauntingly massive.

Still, there were exactly two things she had to focus on. The first was the red blips marking objects that would definitely kill her if she collided with them. The second was the blue blips, the bits that would probably kill her if she hit them. The rest of what she needed to know was how fast they were going and in which direction, and that was laid out in a grid fashion just above her knees and ordered according to which piece was the closest to her.

"Rails aren't any good against these suckers," muttered Seig frustratedly. "Fuckers are flying like a drunk monkeys. Shifting power to cannons. Damn would it be nice to have my rear guard here right about now."

"Coming in hot on your six low, paint what you want dead on flyby," said Nim, not noticing how quiet her voice had gotten as she focused everything she had on following and predicting the debris flying at her. She knew she glanced more than a few blue ones; there were cracks in her cockpit window the size of her fist in four different places and a multitude of dents and missing chunks of armor outside, and that was just in the places she could see with her eyes. Moreover the secondary proximity alarms were blaring right in her ear that there was something immovable she was flying towards and now that they were actually becoming annoying she made a note to bitch slap Sparrow for making them unable to be silenced if she survived.

An unaccounted-for incoming red forced her to shift her path into a blue and eat it on her well-armored nose. It embedded itself like a black stone trophy at the dead center of her fuselage and decimated her nose maneuvering thrusters in one strike. She cursed and another split-second turn sent her skipping off the surface of a huge obsidian scale blasted free of the dreadnought, making it even more clear to her that the whole ship had been made of a giant space rock. The chunks taken out of her cockpit window began to spiderweb out and engulf the whole of her canopy and immediately she reached low and to her right to vent the atmosphere and switch over to full exosuit respiration. She had to keep what she could of the fractured clearsteel from being blown out. The protection was marginal but she needed something between her and the pebble-sized debris she couldn't out-maneuver for as long as she could keep it in once piece.

Suddenly she realized there were a lot more objects on the field than were showing up on her navigational screen. She swerved hard by pushing off another flat space rock with her belly thrusters and dodged a rain of still-glowing shrapnel spit up by the exploding reactors of Hostile One. Sparing a brief look down at her Geiger patch she could see that it was rapidly turning from a vomit color to the shade of orange Sparrow had mentioned as being the color preceding death throes. Then she ignored it. Like hell either of them were dying from something as archaic as radiation poisoning.