All hell broke loose within a single moment. da Vinci couldn’t have described it any other way. Even on the logs later, everything happened at once.
Three cruiser-class vessels appeared out of a short jump and let loose. That was when she discovered that the Makos came in a variety of flavors. At the time, it was just beams everywhere she looked.
Two of the cruisers were standard Makos. One big Mauler on the front of a long, triangular hull, like the maw of a hungry shark. Nine Pulse beams, three on a facing, plus six Flicker beams defensively, or two per side.
Upside: enough firepower to seriously mess up a Founder-class heavy cruiser in the sort of drop-koala ambush these people preferred. The Pulse beam was comparable to a Type-3 for dangerous, but only had about the range of a Type-2, so they had to get close to use it. Downside: a Pulse beam had a hard time locking on something as small as a moving fightercraft, especially when you couldn’t see it. And Devilfish knew they were coming.
Kid had smarts. She reacted immediately when the bad guys bipped into existence on the fringes of the squadron. Lit two of them up with every jammer and kitchen sink she had, while organizing the entire Wing to hit the one closest to the original flight path, so nobody had to turn far.
Furious had taught Auberon’s pilots how to get crazy with the gyroscopes in combat. It was old hat, now.
The Buran cruiser opened fire into the oncoming wing set to pass down his right flank.
“All ships, engage on Beta,” Devishfish called in a singsong voice. “I repeat, lock on Beta and engage.”
da Vinci approved. Jouster would have demanded that the order come from him. Maybe he would have trusted da Vinci to do it, but only because they had been friends for fifteen years. Devilfish was still wet behind the ears, but every second counted right now.
As one, the entire wing spun in place. They had been going all out, in order to get as far away from the original danger point as possible. On command, everyone had shut their engines down, rolled their noses over, and cut loose on the stupid bastard that had come out on their number two facing.
And that was when the Type-1-Pulse beam suddenly showed why Yan Bedrov had built it. Sucker managed to absorb all the Type-3’s, although da Vinci could see places where the whatever-it-was they used instead of shields leaked, or something. Shots had gotten through and speared metal like an ice pick.
Then the staccato-1’s picked up. And his front shields went down.
One beam wasn’t all that impressive, certainly not at this sort of distance. They were intended for use on other fighters or missiles, or for when the fighters were escorting a bigger ship and being ignored. At this range, it was probably like being slapped. Painful, but not lethal.
Unless you had twenty C-1 fighters all slapping you at the same time. Then it became tragic.
One Mako, with his nose chewed off. Bugger managed to jump, but he was leaking atmosphere and bleeding metal parts in his wake as he left.
Elapsed time, forty seconds.
The other two had disappeared as well, leaving da Vinci and her flock alone again.
“Flight Wing, invert one five zero, roll ten, yaw thirty, max acceleration, move,” da Vinci ordered.
Nose pointed backwards and down, and then spun to one side. Physics was physics. They would decelerate, relative to their previous pace, and be headed towards the south pole of the system, more or less. Boss had said Buran tended to be two dimensional fighters, so hopefully this would get them away from a second pass.
da Vinci wasn’t sure they would survive a second pass.
The headcount was ugly.
Turned out that the Mako on the port bow had been a Thresher, not a Mako. Instead of that Mauler that was next to useless against fighters, it had belched up some sort of super-energy beam and had simply shut down Sunset and five other fighters it had touched. Some sort of directed electro-magnetic pulse that blew every breaker at the same time but didn’t damage anything.
Ignored everyone’s shields, though, just like that damned Mauler.
Seventeen others were damaged, in addition to six that had been destroyed. The joys of that Pulse beam. If it hit, you splattered, whereas the Flicker beams might just blow your shields down and tattoo ugliness into your hull.
Cayenne and EVA teams were in motion. Of the seventeen, twelve could more or less keep up with the formation. The other five were either already shut down from damage, or going dark as soon as rescue could get to them.
Final score: one porcupine wounded, une shark with his nose kicked in.
Hopefully, Keller was out there, distracting those bastards. Nobody had ever promised da Vinci she would die in bed, but that sounded a whole lot better than the alternative, right about now.