The situation on and above the Glowing Planet had deteriorated enormously in the past week. Ghanso Larkinson spent more ti in space than in the fleet carrier. Everyone only caught four to five standard hours of sleep, and so didn’t even bother going to bed.
Right now, the Volari Starhawks battled a large fleet of unknowns who didn’t consider the ch Corps to be an obstacle. Unlike the other pirate fleets who constantly tried to maneuver around their forces, this strange group of carriers and spaceborn chs boldly tried to bulldoze through the Starhawks.
"Who are these guys?! I don’t recognize any of their models!"
"They’re exiles from another star sector." Old Man Alex replied as he endured another barrage of lasers in front of Ghanso’s Vhedra-S. "All kinds of scum are attracted to the frontier. These fellows must have co to our star sector to excavate so treasures before they decided to go for the Glowing Planet instead."
In truth, the Volari Starhawks outnumbered the unknowns, but the invaders obviously consisted of so elite force. Much of their chs turned out to be second-class and possessed a distinctive edge against the cheaper chs used by the ch Corps. If not for their excellent training and coordination, they would have been smashed to pieces by the foreign chs.
Watch out for those orange-striped chs!" Lieutenant Fairfax warned. "They’ve shaken off our elites and are heading in our way!"
Ghanso quietly cursed the foreigners. Why did everyone want to stick their fingers into the pie that represented the Glowing Planet. Was a planet’s worth of junk exotics that much worth the effort?
The Volari Starhawks learned quickly not to underestimate the orange-striped chs among the foreigners. Besides being better quality chs that boasted significantly higher specs, their pilots all appeared to be advanced pilots that had reached their upper limits. Even though they lacked the deterrence of an expert pilot, so many elites gathered into a single squad could affect the course of the entire battle.
"Ghanso! Focus on their rifleman chs! Suppress them as best as you can!"
"On it!"
The battle had turned into a wild battle for speed and maneuverability, which made it hard to secure a kill. The incoming enemies approached Ghanso’s squad with so much acceleration that his Vhedra-S only scored so glancing blows with its laser rifle.
"They’re circling around us!"
Insteading of clashing head-on against Fairfax’s squad, the orange-striped elites took up a wide orbit around them. Ghanso kept firing calmly despite his disadvantageous position. The frequent skirmishes he’d been through beforehand had polished his instincts to the point where he scrubbed any clues that he’d once been a rookie.
"They’ve got more rifleman chs than us! I can hardly hold my ground here!" Alex yelled over the comm as his space knight took an increasingly more severe beating. "We should bring the fight to them!"
Ghanso agreed with his squad mate. "Alex is right, lieutenant! Please give us the order to engage!"
His Vhedra-S rapidly accumulated heat as its rifle spat out beam after beam. Most of them ended up splashing ineffectually against his opponent’s superior armor. It took sustained hits on the sa location to do lasting damage.
In a battle with such speeds, Ghanso found it impossible to accomplish such a tall order. His beam often splashed all over the place. Any pilot whose ch got hit would instantly juke in a spin or in a different direction. The more surface the laser beam affected, the shallower the mark it left on the armor.
"Captain Rynsel and her n are on the way! Just hold out for ten more minutes!"
As he fired another ineffectual laser beam, Ghanso glanced at the proximity map and noted ten incoming friendlies approaching from below. Everyone on the squad cheered at the thought of being reinforced. These elites had been hamring their rifles at their chs. They wouldn’t last more than a minute at this rate.
"Alert! High energy emission detected!"
"Incoming cot!"
"That’s not a cot, that’s a ch!"
A bright blue-white flare approached the section of space where Ghanso and his comrades fought against the foreigners. Their collective sensor readings quickly resolved the incoming contact as an unknown ch of a unique design. One thing stood out the rest. It outputted as much energy as five heavy chs.
"Oh mother! We’ve kicked the hornet’s nest!" Alex exclaid. "HE’S COMING STRAIGHT FOR US!"
The cot-like ch crashed straight towards Alex’s ch. Its extre relative speed hardly allowed anyone else to respond to its appearance in ti. Ghanso narrowly engaged his ch’s flight systems to back up, just in ti to evade a narrow glowing stripe that passed just in front.
While the cot ch darted away, the space knight that had always stood by Ghanso’s side suddenly parted in half from the waist before exploding in a violent conflagration.
"No!" Ghanso yelled as he couldn’t believe how fast his partner’s space knight had been killed. "Alex!"
Old Man Alex didn’t have the ti eject. His odds of survival was nil.
Captain Rynsel’s squad suddenly stopped and turned around. "Fairfax! Disengage right now! You just got hit by an expert pilot! He’s turning around for another pass!"
Everyone panicked when they heard they faced an expert ch. Lieutenant Fairfax swiftly ordered everyone to split up and flee in separate directions. Even with Alex’s ch, the entire squad stood no chance of surviving against a single expert pilot.
"AArghh! I’m ejecting!"
One of their squadmates had to eject because the foreigners that had continued to circle around them took advantage of their loss of cohesion. The orange-striped elites had shifted their aim so smoothly that Ghanso suspected that they must have practiced this tactic.
"He’s here!"
This ti, the expert ch slashed two of their chs in quick succession. Only one of their squad mates ejected in ti. The other perished when his ch blew up.
Ghanso felt imnse pressure to eject, but he held back due to the obligation to bring back his machine intact. The ch Corps took a dim view on those who wasted their expensive war materiel. He continued to pray that the expert pilot wouldn’t target him next.
In the next couple of minutes, the expert pilot targeted their reinforcents. Captain Rynsel feebly tried to resist, but eventually had to eject.
Just when Ghanso thought he made it away, the expert pilot curved his high-speed trajectory in a straight path towards his Vhedra-S.
"He’s on to you, Ghanso!"
"Eject already! You don’t stand a chance against this expert!"
Ghanso didn’t want to abandon his ch so soon. Even if his fellow Starhawks wouldn’t bla him for the early ejection, it still would have left a stain in his heart. As a ch pilot born to the cause, the last thing he could tolerate was to carry a brand of sha. Such a sha had a high chance of affecting his potential advancent to expert pilot.
The Vhedra-S threw all caution to the wind and fired beam after beam at the swift and relentless expert ch. No matter what tricks Ghanso pulled off, the expert pilot dodged his aim again and again. It was as if the expert read his mind!
Even then, Ghanso never gave up his attempt to land a single hit. He even increased his rifle’s rate of fire to a ruinous level. Even if he stopped firing right now, both his ch and his rifle had been ruined irrevocably.
Ghanso didn’t care. His mind sublimated during the brief interval as the expert ch ca closer and closer. He vented his grief for losing Alex and his fellow squad mbers through his weapon. Each laser that struck out into the vacuum of space was another defiant scream to the unfairness of facing an expert pilot without support.
"Co on! I need a hit! Just one hit!"
In the final three seconds, Ghanso had beco so fired up that his mind montarily breached an invisible barrier. At that mont, a spark of fla exploded within him that guided his aim towards another direction.
His laser only scorched the expert ch for 0.15 seconds. The incredibly skilled expert swiftly adjusted his course before the laser could even begin to burn away the outer coating.
"Pull out!"
This ti, Ghanso listened to the communication channel. He sent out a ntal command which instantly disconnected the cockpit from the rest of the ch. The sudden loss of connection jarred Ghanso sufficiently that he didn’t witness his cockpit escaping from the ch in ti for the expert pilot to slash through the rest of the fra in a single slash.
Instead, as soon as he recovered, he laughed. "Hahahaha! I scored a hit! I scored a single hit!"
As his cockpit flung away from the battle and followed an arcing course to the rear lines of the Starhawk fleet, Ghanso laughed and cried at the sa ti. He laughed for surviving an encounter against a dread expert pilot, and he cried for the friends he would never be able to see again.
"Damn this Glowing Planet? It would have done this galaxy a favor if it ca across a black hole and disappeared beyond its event horizon."
Battles erupted across the entire orbit of the Glowing Planet. The Vesians had also been hard-pressed to hold back as many pirates as possible. In the anti, hordes of pirates and rcenaries slipped through the gaps and descended to the surface of the Glowing Planet.
Battle raged throughout the airless skies above the rogue planet. The pirates fought against the rcenaries, the rcenaries fought against the military, the military fought against the pirates, and the pirates fought among themselves.
Infighting was rife even among allies in the sa fleet. It only took a couple of stray shots to splash against a nominal allied outfit to provoke a brawl. Even the pirate lords that browbeat the small outfits together couldn’t alleviate the constantly rising tempers.
Broken chs and chunks of space ships kept descending from above in regular numbers. Back at the base erected by Walter’s Whalers, their turrets sporadically fired at an incoming artificial teorite from above.
Sotis, even the rifleman and cannoneer chs had to lend a hand in order to break apart a particularly large piece of spaceship debris.
Still, that was child’s play compared to the incoming pirates. Sotis, elents of a pirate fleet got so confused that they lost their course and landed sowhere close to the red zone occupied by the ch Corps. Any ch carriers that landed in the vicinity of the Blood Claws and the Whalers had to be destroyed before they could get away.
"You’ve improved!" Fadah complinted Raella as she swiped the head off a pirate ch in a single blow. "It was just last week when you could barely hold on against a single pirate."
"That scum was an elite!" Raella spat back as her Sliverath danced around the disarrayed pirate chs with as much grace as the Blackbeak. The two made for an intimidating pair, and together with Dietrich’s long-ranged support they developed a practiced routine. "I’m hungry. I hadn’t been able to eat my lunch all day. Let’s wipe these bastards out fast before I starve to death!"
The chs aligned to the Bright Republic fought without holding anything back. Ever since Ves submitted his undercharged energy cell designs, every ch received the new energy cells. While the ch pilots faced a couple of complications due to their lower capacity and unstable energy supply, they all sighed in relief because they wouldn’t get blown up anymore.
Naturally, such a montous developnt couldn’t be kept to themselves. The ch Legion sohow got ahold of the designs and began producing their own replacent energy cells.
So of the other well-connected factions such as the Dragons of the Void followed suit.
This had divided the forces on the planet in three.
First ca the ch Corps and the ch Legion who had fully converted their energy cells to the safer designs.
Second were the poorer pirate outfits and rcenary corps who didn’t possess enough connections to get their hands on the valuable designs for the safer energy cells.
Third were the incoming pirates, rcenaries and treasure hunters who just descended upon the planet. Since they hadn’t been subjected to the surface energy fields for long, their energy cells hadn’t developed an overcharge yet. This would change in the next couple of days, but until then they swaggered around their landing sites, provoking trouble wherever they went.
Thus, the Blood Claws and the Whalers constantly had to fight the smaller outfits while the ch Corps mopped up the largest concentration of scum. After fighting multiple battles, everyone started to feel the strain.
User Comments
0 comments from readers