Okay. This is about where it becomes obvious that neither of us are really used to handling multiple third-person perspectives at once. This is really something new for me, I'm used to handling one or two characters at once with a limited perspective, or First person. Is this reading alright?
A lot of this is supposed to be happening near simultaneously, and it's hard to do that without multi-threading becoming multi-tangled.
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
A lot of this is supposed to be happening near simultaneously, and it's hard to do that without multi-threading becoming multi-tangled.
Quote:Hotaru ‘manned’ the weapons console on the bridge of the Nova. She held herself in her own private world, ignoring the tension around her. Her blue eyes stared, reflecting twin images of the TFT screen.________________________________
Authorisation ‘Silence Glaive’. Mode. Ground fire support. Switch to high resolution gun-camera mode. Overlay map. Target select. Laser rangefinder. System calculations. Compensate for relative velocity. Adjust for rotation. Adjust for engine coil magnetic effects. Firing solution input. Lock solution.
There was enough ECM going up to make using any sort of radar guided missile an exercise in futility. The Nova had coilguns; bog standard projectile weapons. The good thing about the coilgun was that, once they’d left the barrel, the bullets would only go in the one direction.
While computers could help, ultimately it was solely down to the skill and experience of the gunner to get them on target. Hotaru prided herself on being able to make the money shot. Hotaru prided herself on being able to fill in the blanks that the computers just couldn’t.
Her displays lit up green as the Nova’s targeting computer finally figured itself out, pulling something resembling a proper solution out of all the variables.
“Firing solution locked,” she said, to no-one in particular. She flicked up a translucent molly guard.
The command came back. “Fire!”
That little green button clicked as she pushed it in. Relays latched. Control circuits energised. Turrets tracked targets. Gun barrels adjusted themselves. The Nova had a pair of turrets, each with a pair of coilguns. Each turret tracked it’s own target.
A heartbeat after Hotaru’d pushed the button, the guns fired their first bursts. Moments later, they fell silent, re-aimed themselves, then fired again. Each burst shook the Nova’s frame, the recoil of the guns acting as thrusters.
Hotaru’d compensated for it. It was something that was hard to computerise. It required intuition. It required experience. It required a pilot who knew what she was doing to keep the ship on course.
Tracers lanced out into space.
The guns stopped, finishing their cycle. Hotaru’s panels flashed red. The capacitor banks were empty. Stupid things always took forever to recharge.
“Firing complete,” she reported.
She sounded almost disappointed.
----
Quattro wore a shark’s smirk in her lab, playing her own electronic symphony on her holographic keyboard. A wall of ECM kept the incoming ship from launching missiles. They didn’t even seem to be trying to fight back against it.
She adjusted her glasses. They were properly docked with the clips on the side of her skull, providing full wireless access and her own computer systems. This was her at her strongest, her most powerful, her most undefeatable.
A few keystrokes armed Nehallenia’s missile battery. They were a token effort, enough to discourage a single attacker, but not a full fleet. She might be able to take out the vanguard, but all that’d do was buy her time.
If GJ had any sort of competence, they’d be coming straight to her lab. The elite troops would come in first and hit hardest. Anything following would just be a mop-up.
Quattro cursed as she saw the target appear to discrete, five new contacts appearing under it. Missiles? Working with inhuman speed, she answered back with a hail of chaff and anti-missile countermeasures. She filled the void with shrapnel.
The missiles just dodged around. They weren’t just guided, they weren’t riding radar beams.There was an intelligence in there, anticipating, dodging, re-aiming. AI guided missiles. She smirked to herself, so GJ really did use them. She made a quick estimate of their impact time, before returning fire.
Cathy, still in her prison, could only gape as she saw four green markers move inevitably towards one large red one. The monitor cut out moments later, switching over to a text terminal.
Quattro turned back to her for a second. “I assume your AI friend is on that ship? Don’t worry, you will be joining it soon.”
Cathy did not answer... the Nova was a good ship, and the Stargazer had her own forcefield. Jet and the other Kunstlers were far more agile than anything Quattro had... they would manage to break this insane woman's defenses. They would rescue her... somehow.
She had to hope.
----
Hotaru’s panel lit up. Her stomach screwed itself into a know.
“Track four missiles. Inbound. Impact. Thirty seconds.”
“Confirmed.” Desmond said, stonefaced, upper lip properly stiff.
Mari thought quickly. “Corkscrew Port!”
A jerk hit the bridge as the Nova was suddenly thrown into a spiral rotation, inertial dampers overwhelmed. The ships’ structure creaked and groaned with the strain, threatening to tear itself apart. Strain gauges threw up warning lights as they went out of limits. Gunshot bangs rang through the frame as old welds gave way.
Mari was pinned painfully against her hardness, straps crushing into her body as g-forces tried to force her stomach out her mouth. Hotaru held on for dear life to a pair of worn grab-handles mounted to her panel, hair only held down by virtue of Brylcreem.
Desmond stood firm, the projection completely unaffected by the G-force until his projector began to buckle on its mountings.
Anything loose was thrown about the ship. Bedding, toys and books along with a mass of cutlery, food remains, a surprised mouse and some panelling that’d come loose where tossed around like lose change in a running washing machine, rattling and pattering and crashing against each other and the hull.
Linda was pinned against the ceiling of the battery compartment. In the engine room Andy Maion clung on to hand-holds, pressing himself against a sealed electrical panel. In the cargo-bay, the Stargazer lifted against its tie-downs. Cortana wondered about who was flying.
Carrie at the controls grunted and hung on, trusting the old Boskone rustbucket to hold itself together.
“Missiles still tracking. Ten seconds,” Hotaru called out.
“Collision!” Mari barked.
Linda braced herself with one hand, keying open the ships intercom. “Brace, Brace, Brace!”. Alarms began to chime throughout the ship. Pressure doors locked themselves shut.
“Reverse your turn,” Mari ordered. “Deploy countermeasures!”
Carrie hauled the Nova over, pulling the nose straight up. The forces on her body inverted, driving her down into the chair. Everything that’d taken flight during the dive crashed to the deck. It sounded like a car crash. Hotaru stabbed at a button on her panel.
Covers blew off the belly of the Nova, revealing packed rows of cartridges.They burst, filling the space behind the ship with a cloud of metallic foil, burning flares and radio signal generators. The hope was that it’d be good enough to confuse the missiles tracking systems while the Nova changed course.
Now, there was nothing left to do but hang on and hope that it’d be enough. Count the seconds. Count the heartbeats. Whisper a prayer. Hang on. Just keep hanging on. Glance at the screen. Estimate three seconds to impact. Hold your breath.
Two seconds. The longest two seconds imaginable.
One second. Maybe the last of a lifetime.
The first missile met the cloud of countermeasures. It burst into a hail of razor-sharp confetti. The second, followed suit. The third missile had its motor knocked out by a stray shard of shrapnel. It spiralled off into the black trailing smoke.
The fourth missile streaked straight on through the cloud of expanding debris, zeroing in on the plume blazing out of the Nova’s starboard engine nacelle.
Hotaru didn’t even get the chance to shout out “Missile inbound!” before it hit.
----
There were five of them, armed with an assortment of shotguns, stun-guns and handguns. They’d managed to set themselves up something of a barricade in a corridor somewhere between the residential area and the restricted section. It was made up of little more than crates loaded with food, a pair of old bulkhead doors and some bedding. It’d still stop bullets.
Edward inspected his work, brushing his hands together. “Well, nobody’s ain’t getting through that without a fight.”
“Why are we doing this?” Laura wondered, nervously rubbing her hands together. “These people are pro’s.”
“They’ll take us to prison,” Ebony said, babbling fearfully, clutching some old Makarov to her chest as if it was a shield. “I don’t want to go to Azkhaban, there’re real Zwilniks there,”
Himei was still giddy. The Remington she had was her first gun. It was her first real gun. Finger
on the trigger, ready to shoot at the first thing that came around the corner up ahead. Her whole body was just shaking, fear and adrenaline sparking and surging inside her.
Edward crouched down behind the barricade, making a point of keeping the barrel of his shotgun aimed away from the others.“Five of us from cover, I reckon that’ll make something of a defense. We can hold them up, make them cut a deal.”
Cob was quiet. Ebony was right. Going to Azkhaban with real criminals just wasn’t an option. They weren’t criminals, they were just.... well.... they were just idiots. Panicked, desperate idiots. Run to the launchbay, they’d be killed as soon as the doors were blown. Stay on the station, go to prison. Then die in prison or worse. Going to prison was bad. A cold place where no sun shines.
Maybe if they fought back, they might be able to negotiate something. This was their station after all. Cob checked his taser. Yeah... that might work.
----
Quattro switched the base defenses over to automatic. She herself didn’t even bother following the missiles once they were outbound, not especially caring whether they actually hit or not. It didn’t matter to her.
So long as it bought her more time. So long as the catgirl didn’t see them successfully evade.
If she was lucky, she’d blown it out of the sky. If not - most likely not - she’d still bought herself another few minutes while it circled around and came back for another pass to make a landing.
She did the maths in her mind. It worked out. Quattro rigged the system to write garbage over the disks first, overwriting files with random data..
Second, she set the encryption software to erase its own keys when the system powered down. What would be left on the disks would be little more than a chaotic smudge of bytes.
A high-powered AI might be able to crack it, eventually. What they’d get when they were done, would be a few minutes worth of output from a real random number source. They’d have wasted all that time with the decryption, to get nothing.
Well not nothing, she reminded herself bitterly, but even the good data that’d been stolen by that pest would be suspect thanks to the garbage she’d fed it.
It was much more satisfying to make them work for their failure, wasn’t it? She spared a half-second to check up on the attacking ship, getting no surprises, before dealing with the final piece of evidence standing in the Cat’s Cradle, whimpering.
The thought did occur to her to just shoot the thing, but a dead catgirl wouldn’t hold anyone up. It’d just be a body to be cleared up later. A live blank would have to be dealt with; it would have to be cared for. A live blank wouldn’t obviously be blank for quite some time.
She couldn’t destroy her systems until after she’d finished with the thing, but it’d take her five minutes to wipe it. It’d cost the enemy twice as long trying to deal with it. Spend five minutes she was sure she hand now to earn five extra minutes she would need later; it sounded like a bargain.
She turned around for the last time, “Well it’s been fun, but it’s time for you to go.” Her expression morphed into a mockery of glee, “Goodbye!”
She didn’t get the chance to start the sequence. With a metallic bang, the laboratory door slammed open, rebounding against the wall. Quattro spun on her heels to face the open door, drawing her stun-gun.
----
Naoko Sato pulled her car door shut behind her, while simultaneously starting the engine with her other hand. There had been no time to pack. Just run....
The engine stuttered to life. She slammed the fencar into gear. The gearbox started to whine as the magnetic generators came on line and she felt that a momentary wave of dizziness come over her as the car’s gravitational field established itself. The cabin switched over to internal life support with a thunk and a gaseous hiss, while the intruments did their usual disco-dance.
Time to run... again. It was a bitter reminder of how she felt that day when that bitch took everything from her.
It rose slowly up off the launchpad for a few moments as she tickled the throttle. The bay doors started to open. The atmosphere rushed out, punching them both clear off their hinges.
Fuck this world and everyone in it. They always take what I have.
Riding that thought, Naoko stomped on the gas and shot out into the void.
----
Jet was forging her way through through the rain of metal and fire. Shrapnel pattered off her armour as she jinked round a point defense missile that got a little too close for comfort. Jet just cursed and pushed on.
She saw four missiles shoot by, aimed at the Nova. The Nova’s own shots would hit any second now. One, two, three, four all five of them were chasing the projectiles in.
Five sets of explosions blossomed across the surface of the base, blowing holes in it’s structure. Atmosphere burst out, sending gouts of freezing mist into space, carrying twinkling shards of debris. Moments later, the base lights flickered and died. The rain of shrapnel ceased.
“Engel flight. Remember your objectives,” she broadcast.
Four acknowledgements came back, clear and crisp despite the electronic wall being thrown up by the stations.
“Proceed to targets,” she ordered.
They broke formation, taking individual paths down towards the base. Jet dove down towards a smoking hole, the point on the surface nearest to Quattros lab.
Jet caught a glimpse of a lemon yellow fencar shooting off away into the dark. She tracked it for a moment. It matched descriptions of Satos fencar. Jet swore privately. Sato was running free.
But fuck her. She wasn’t the main target here, not by a long shot. So long as Quattro wasn’t in that thing with her, the mission was still on.
So long as Quattro didn’t escape.
Jet tried once to hail the Nova, then a second time. There was no response.
Jet tried not to wonder what had happened to them, but couldn’t help but recall those missiles. Even one of them in the wrong place would be enough to turn the Nova into a puffball of expanding debris. Jet looked back, taking a moment to scan for the ship. She didn’t see her. She didn’t see a cloud of debris either. That was a mild relief.
She landed hard on the surface of the asteroid, kicking up a hail of regolith. There were scattered craters around her feet, where a few stray shots had ripped up the rock, leading straight up to a gaping hole in the wall. Beyond, was a corridor filled with debris, lit only by the dim orange glow of battery backed emergency lights.
The cyborg ran inside.
----
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?