by Aer-ki Jyr
The rover also appeared on the schematic as a blue square, with two turrets just behind it going out in sequence, expanding the dead zone around it as the now heavily plated machine continued to move forward, but oddly not taking any hits. It had a target sphere, like the turrets, though it required a great deal more stun energy to take down, and in the past weeks the other trainee pairs had begun hitting it at range so as to accumulate enough stun to knock it out before it could get in a position to seriously curtail their advance.
Suddenly three of the turret screens showed a blur of white uniform jump out of cover then race off camera…only to show up on two more screens for a split second. Those turrets still on auto tracked in the direction of the movement, while the trainer controlled ones remained trained on the intercept point of the rover, unable to fire at the blur if they had wanted to.
“What the hell???” the trainer remote-controlling the rover said as his screen suddenly tilted down at an angle towards the floor. “They did something to my camera!”
The head trainer in the room, Franklin, shook his head as his eyes darted from one viewscreen to the next. “It’s not the camera,” he said, finally getting a good view. “One of them is under the rover! Shake it loose!”
The controller accelerated and reversed throttle several times, able to rock his view of the floor and nearby barricade that it was pinned up against, but the front wheels were the only ones contacting the floor and not enough to break it free of the trainee’s grasp, because the squeal of the tires was clearly audible with the video feed.
“I can’t get free!”
“Everyone, target the rover,” Franklin ordered to those in the control room and through the comms to the trainers deployed in the walls. “Try for splash damage.”
One of the snipers in the wall moved his sights off the dead zone of turrets and back to where the rover had stopped, seeing its back end sticking up over the barricade, wheels spinning uselessly. One of the punks must have slithered in behind it and lifted it up off its wheels…now he was hiding underneath the damn machine!
Between the ‘roof’ of the rover and the barricade beside him, the trainee had good cover from the sniper’s position, though he guessed one of the others would have a better shot at his open side, and if he popped his head up even a few inches he’d get nailed. From Jenkins’s position he could clearly see the top of the back left wheel spinning…which gave him an idea. If he could hit the moving wheel, it might spray a bit of the paint down on the trainee, numbing him a bit, maybe enough to cause him to drop the rover.
Figuring it was worth a shot, Jenkins fired three quick blue stingers at the distant wheel, with two missing a few inches high and the third hitting in the center hub and missing the rotating rubber. He cursed the design change they’d made from treads to wheels after the trainees had jammed one of their rifles into the treads to stop the thing…now the six wheels didn’t have enough individual power to pull the rover down off its hoist, whereas he figured the original treads might have.
Jenkins fired another two shots, with one of them marking the tire with a blue splash. He didn’t have time to see if it flicked any paint before two stingers hit the wall slit he was firing from, one bisecting on the edge and the other flying straight through and hitting him in the shoulder. He fell backwards out of his niche and hit the ground butt first in the tiny hallway that ringed the course, connecting all the bunker cubicles so the trainers could reposition at will.
“Damn it,” he swore in a whisper. The rover heist had been nothing more than a distraction!
Unable to feel his right arm at all, Jenkins threw his sniper rifle aside with his left and tried to sit up, but found his balance lacking with half his torso numb. He tried to roll over to his left side as a giant black hand reached down and grabbed him by the collar of his uniform and hauled him up into a sitting position against the back wall.
“Thanks,” Jenkins muttered as the Black Knight stepped over him and continued on down the hallway towards one of the hidden entrances.
Paul stood on his knees underneath the rover with his left shoulder tucked up against the barricade, trying to make his body as small as possible as the machine was continuously pelted with stingers, so much so that the paint was beginning to drip down off the sides. He held the rover aloft with a firm grip on the underside just behind the aft armored panel, placing his balled fists up into the gap and using the extended metallic plate like a bumper to hold it in place as the front tires spun back and forth trying to break his grip. The rover should have been seamlessly plated underneath as well…yet one more design flaw that Paul was happy to exploit.
He knew that as long as the paint was flying his way, Jason would be hunting the snipers in the walls, now that they were only four rings away. His partner couldn’t take down any of the turrets without his help, but once the snipers were out of the picture he could flip the rover over and leave them nothing but the predictable turrets to deal with…which would mean they’d be all but home free.
Then something he didn’t expect happened…the turrets and snipers stopped firing on the rover.
For a moment he thought they’d caught on to their gambit, but that didn’t explain why all the turrets had turned off him. Some still should have been hitting him, out of range to target Jason…then he realized by the lack of sound that they had stopped firing altogether…
He was facing the underside of the rover with his head pinned so that he couldn’t see anything but the floor when he heard footsteps behind him and a creepy sense of dread arced through his bones. A moment later the rover flew up and off him, flipping over and landing upside down as Paul reflexively rolled to the side and looked up at the armored giant behind him.
The Black Knight had no sword, but he quickly touched his wrists together with the distinctive crackle/pop of a stun charge all but echoing in the chamber.
Paul’s roll never stopped as he flipped over again and got to his feet, running a step and diving over the previous row of barricades, landing in a somersault and rolling up into a run, not even thinking about the turrets. He got four full length strides in before he felt something hard hit the small of his back and he blacked out…
Paul came to looking up into the face of a med tech as the denumbing injection spread throughout his blood stream and soaked up the lingering stun charge, leaving his back just a little bit tingly.
“Any injuries?” the medic asked.
“No,” Paul said, sitting up and shaking off the haze. Every time he woke up from getting stunned it felt like he was coming out of a deep, dreamy sleep leaving reality a bit fragmented. He blinked a few times and his head cleared. “Thanks,” he offered.
“Been a while,” the medic said chattily. “You guys used to keep us pretty busy, but now it’s mostly the other group. I thought the big guy only hit you during team challenges?”
“So did we,” Paul said, getting to his feet and walking over to where Jason was laying unconscious. The medic followed him over and quickly injected his teammate with the quick release dart-pen that seemed to never leave a mark. Jason jerked a moment later, snapping out of his stun-induced haze quicker than Paul had. He blinked away the grogginess then his gaze froze as he mentally backtracked through what had just happened.
He looked up at Paul as his teammate offered him a hand. “I really hate that son of a bitch.”
4
Twelve days later…
“Third wave incoming,” Paul said into his headset as he toggled the navigational controls in the simulation pod.
Jason looked at his radar screen, guessing as to the type of craft deploying against their single warship. A distant dot had appeared at the edge of the engagement zone then quickly began to expand into a cloud of smaller dots.
“Looks like drones,” he said, inputting new targeting parameters into fire control.
“Yep,” Paul answered, adjusting the line of their small warship to point directly into the approaching swarm. “Try a
nd split them up.”
“Already on it,” Jason said, aligning the primary rail gun. He aimed in the center of the formation and fired off a pair of medium rounds in sequence.
Both missed the tiny attack cubes, nothing more than a casing, engine, and laser mount controlled by either the onboard computer or remote uplink. On cue, the drone swarm drifted away from the firing path, turning their sphere into a donut as they sped toward the warship.
Jason fired off several more rounds, counting on the predictable computer responses as the drones attempted to flank their opposition, allowing him to somewhat reposition their enemy before they came within effective laser range.
“Go,” he said, forgetting about the rail run and prepping their missiles racks…which for this challenge contained infinite ammunition.
Paul, controlling the helm, accelerated their warship to starboard and cut diagonally across the drones approach vector, causing them to shift course and effectively line up in chunks rather than being able to attack simultaneously. He would have preferred to accelerate away from them, further delaying their approach and making them easier to pick apart, but there was a range limit to the battlefield and passing through it would result in immediate disqualification.
So without the ability to stretch things out, Paul did the next best thing…he brought the ship to a full stop, allowed Jason to fire off another rail gun salvo, then accelerated hard towards the incoming swarm, making the time span of the upcoming pass by shorter.
One of the tiny dots on the radar winked out as the metallic slugs cored straight through the staggered clumps of drones, but it was little more than a lucky hit. In order to take them out they were going to have to go in close…and with an elapsed time bonus for the challenge at play, the enemy computer wasn’t going to give them time to set up and think about it.
“Belly first,” Paul said, finally cutting thrust and flipping the rectangular ship up on its tail as Jason pulled up the ventral mounted laser turrets while leaving the others on autofire, hopefully hitting some of the drones as they passed by.
A few insignificant hits registered on the warship’s armor…the drones firing outside effective range, with the beams losing cohesion and doing little more than warming a large area of the hull or being harmlessly deflected. Jason didn’t bother returning fire at this range, even with his medium lasers and their extended range it was going to be difficult to target the smaller ships, while their cutter stood out like a big fat target.
Instead he waited until the first of them crossed a perimeter line on his radar, then fired off a cluster of missiles towards the formation, already programmed to home in on any proximity targets after moving a pre-specified distance away from their own ship.
“Move,” Jason said, synching up three laser batteries into one targeting reticule.
Paul was already a split second away from hitting the throttle, and quickly sent the ship upwards, then used their thrusters to set it spinning slightly, but still belly down to the line of attack, given that the dorsal side of the ship had received damage during the second round, and the reflective panels covering the armor had been shattered.
The panels on the belly were as yet untouched, giving Paul and Jason their best chance at defense against an all laser attack, though there were still unprotected spots on the hull where the mirror-like panels didn’t cover. Those areas were still caked with thick armor, but the lasers would eat into them with successive hits, and with the point of this last naval challenge being to survive as long as possible, every action they took would affect the odds of their success.
Which was why Paul had begun slowly spinning the ship around its vertical axis, making it harder for the drones to target the non-reflective areas or weapons batteries. The damage on the opposite side of the ship had come from missile attacks, most of which had been shot down in transit thanks to Jason’s hot gunnery hand, but a few had gotten through and shattered most of the mirrors, opening up the top of the ship to laser attacks.
The reason Paul had split up the attackers was to keep the lot of them from surrounding the ship and attacking them on the weak side, as well as to hopefully target and kill a few before the others arrived, minimizing the number of laser strikes on them at any given moment.
Jason fired off a second group of missiles then waited patiently for them to shrink on his targeting screen. When they did, he began taking long range shots around the edges of the missiles as the first group hit pay dirt.
The missiles broke formation and tracked individual targets…some actually seeking the same ones, which worked out when the first would miss and the second could still down the target, but it was downright wasteful when one missile would explode on target and take out another at the same time.
Paul had requested a redesign months ago, interlinking the missiles through short range signals so they could each tag a target of their own that the others would ignore, but so far the Star Force weapons techs hadn’t been able to construct an actual system…which meant they couldn’t use one in the simulations. Everything the trainees had to work with had to be real, and the techs’ slowness in fabrication had become an annoyance to both Paul and several other navally-innovative trainees.
He’d requested a lot of other equipment changes and theoretical applications, but only a few had made their way back to them in the recent months, but what wore on Paul the most was his current inability to come up with a viable defense against the rail guns. He knew there had to be a way, and while he and the others had developed ways of defending against missiles, and to a lesser extent the lasers, the rail guns remained a problem.
Fortunately the first three waves of this challenge hadn’t deployed rail guns this time around. They were tailored for difficulty, but as far as weapons systems were concerned, it was random. This was Paul and Jason’s fifth and probably final attempt, having lightly attempted a run the first two times just to feel it out, then hitting it heavy the third time around and not getting the points they wanted. They’d trimmed things up the fourth time, but felt they’d gotten a bit unlucky so they’d scheduled this late night last attempt while most of their fellow trainees had already finished all of their Tandem challenges.
Morgan was still leading Paul by 354 points in the individual competition, and it was unlikely, but not impossible, for Paul to catch up if they really nailed this challenge, but more than that it was eluding the dynamic duo’s ease of success at the previous four naval Tandem challenges that had secured their top pair status by a huge margin and had brought Paul tediously close to Morgan after two and a half years of challenges…not to mention putting the icing on the cake for the team scores, which the 2s had realistically clenched a few weeks ago.
It was a matter of pride that brought the pair back for a 5th go around…and the fact that they were only the 2nd highest score on the challenge, a full 52 points behind Greg and Nevil, the latter of which was ranked 3rd in the naval subcategory and often provided Paul with a competitive challenge…but nothing that he hadn’t been able to overcome with sufficient prep time.
Paul watched on the viewscreen as blossoms of distant shrapnel exploded, taking many of the dots on the radar with them, leaving a few stragglers on the wings that managed to elude the second wave of missiles that passed between them. Jason immediately went after them, and took down all but two before the missiles detonated and similarly shook up the next clump of drones.
With the enemy thinned out, Jason’s three linked lasers took down each drone usually with one shot…he rarely missed, but with the ship spinning and the drones moving about erratically as they approached, the task was giving him all he could handle.
“Hang on,” Paul said, readying the helm controls again as he watched the positions alter on his navigational display. “We’re rolling up and over.”
“Copy that,” Jason said with an odd voice, having slipped into the ‘zone’ that most of the better gunners had seemed to develop. Paul’s scores didn’t quite put him in th
e elite ranks in that category, but knew how important maintaining one’s focus was when trying to track and target multiple moving targets.
Using a combination of engines and thrusters, Paul moved the ship up and began tilting forward, as if rounding a giant circle with the drones at the center, allowing the closest ones to pass underneath at a distance without getting a good shot at their aft and being able to immediately flank them…meaning a few more seconds of survival time, as well as an opportunity to down more of them before they got into the swarming frenzy that made the little machines so dangerous at close range.
Jason was intent on keeping that from happening and continued to thin the herd as the other clumps approached. They were too close now for the missiles on the proximity setting, and he didn’t have time to reset them, but even if he did he wouldn’t have wanted to take his hands off the joystick and trigger because he was in the middle of racking up an impressive kill score.
Paul flew a lazy course, not disrupting Jason’s firing any more than necessary but keeping the drones off balance as much as he could. His mind meanwhile was split between the simple maneuvering and the overall battle as he watched their ship take several armor hits along the edges of the reflective panels, some of which blew out pieces on the edge when the armor underneath superheated, thus diminishing the overall coverage of the mirrors.
It was minor damage, but it was gradually adding up…though it would have been catastrophic by now without the redirects the mirrors were causing. Neither Paul nor Jason could see the bounces, invisible as they were, but Paul did notice when two of the drones were hit by their own weapons…or rather those of their allies that erratically reflected off the cutter and turned into friendly fire.
Offhandedly Paul wondered about the possibility of creating mobile plates that could intentionally redirect larger, ship-fired laser shots towards enemy targets…then stuffed the idea into the back of his mind as he made another course correction.
