Past the Redline

Throttle Fifty-Three

“Chart me a course around the city that’ll pass by as many viable targets as possible,” Diana asked.

ChaOS took all of a millionth of a second to add new points to the map hovering next to Diana. It now had a dozen red points all across the metropolis and a line weaving around them, bringing each point into range before moving on to the next. The route would be somewhat circuitous, with a few tight turns, but she could manage.

Even as she looked, one red point winked out and the line shifted. She wasn’t surprised. There were others targeting the same locations as her out there, and it was a first-come-first serve kind of race.

Diana shifted her feet on the pedals and sent the Hercules rocketing through the city on a straight path for the first target.

“Mistress, do you have any plans regarding the competitors converging on your location?”

“Yeah, I see them,” Diana said. ChaOS brought up readouts with everything the AI had learned about the incoming ships. All three of them looked like they were modified with everything and anything their pilots could get their hands on.

They were bigger than the average fighter, though not by too much. The biggest could almost rival Abatrath’s corvette, though it wasn’t quite as bulky. The larger ship had some impressive weapons, a pair of turrets above and below its main body with large-calibre cannons, plus a number of smaller guns on swivel mounts across its sides.

The other two ships were a little more traditional in their armament. Lots of forward-facing cannons, rapid-firing guns, and missile-launching systems.

She had ten seconds before she was within their firing range. Diana focused on the targets ahead. The first was a surface-to-air gun emplacement on the edge of what was obviously some sort of open-air park. The gun emplacement was swivelling around, its many cannons firing off hyper-velocity shells with proximity detonators that were filling the air with flak ahead of some racers a distance away. The gun stopped and started to spin towards Diana.

Whoever was in charge saw what was coming.

Diana weaved around a skyscraper, then ducked down below the city’s skyline even as the flak cannons started to pepper the sky with shrapnel where she’d been a moment before.

“Low arc, long fuse missile,” Diana said.

“Loaded.”

They shot out from around a building and Diana pushed the throttle up. The gun emplacement continued to fire, and Diana winced as the shells that missed rammed into the nearest buildings.

Behind her, the two faster racers were going high to avoid the turret emplacement’s fire. She’d won herself a bit of time, at least.

With a flick of her thumb on a dial built into her yoke, Diana selected the missile ChaOS had pre-programmed for her, locked it onto the gun emplacement, then fired.

The missile thumped out of an opening below the Hercules and gently fell to the ground, entirely unpowered.

She blasted past the gun emplacement and the park around it.

Behind her, just as it was nearing the ground, the missile sparked to life and roared across the empty sky to ram into the side of the turret emplacement.

Two seconds later, as the biggest of her tails was flying over the turret, the missile went off.

She was pretty sure that the blast didn’t do anything to the mini-corvette, but maybe it had surprised the pilot.

Her next target was another AA emplacement, this one made up of a dozen tracked vehicles stationed atop what she suspected was a parking garage. It afforded the vehicles a decent line of sight to track any racers that came close enough.

The Hercules shook slightly, and she glanced at her shield readout to see that it had dipped a percent or two. One of the fighters had landed a shot.

“Okay, these guys are becoming annoying,” Diana said.

She flew towards the parking garage, then aimed down at it from above. A few quick trigger-pulls later and she punched a few holes into the lower levels of the building. It probably rattled the soldiers in charge of the vehicles enough to alert them, or so she hoped.

Before they could get a bead on her, she flew to the side and started to circle around the garage while staying close to street-level. She even slowed down to make it easier to fly through the concrete-equivalent canyons.

One of the fighters lost track of her, but the other stayed on her tail.

“Okay, our first victim’s here,” she said.

The AA emplacement started to spray at the other while it circled around, keeping the pilot busy. Which is about what she wanted.

Diana flew around a corner, then gripped her seat hard as she executed a drifting spin that had the Hercules’ rear facing the direction she’d been going in. With a quarter second of full-burn, she was able to slow down to nearly nothing until she was left floating between two commercial buildings, clouds of exhaust puffing out from beneath her ship.

Her HUD showed her exactly where her tail was, despite the buildings in the way. It was basically cheating.

She aimed at the empty sky ahead of the ship and waited, finger touching the trigger.

The fighter came around the corner at a decent speed. She imagined that if the pilot were a human, their eyes would be widening in panic right about then.

She sprayed the ship with lower-calibre rounds, a few thousand of them ramming into the fighter’s forward shields until they were a mess of glowing green splashes. A few rounds managed to sneak through and rammed the fighter craft, but not enough.

“Damnit,” Diana muttered. She cut the throttle to the engines keeping her in place.

A moment later, the fighter barreled through the spot she’d been occupying.

Pulling the yoke back and pushing her forward thrust up a notch, Diana flipped the Hercules around on itself until it was entirely upside down. She didn’t have as much downwards thrust. The ship was designed to have gravity on its side pulling it down. She certainly didn’t have enough to hover on the spot.

Her reticule fell over the fighter and she fired even as the Hercules started to drop .

The fighter’s shields, already battered, gave up. The ship rocked as Diana filled it with holes. Something vital was hit, and the fighter craft blew up in a rather spectacular fashion before tumbling down and ramming into the road.

She spun the Hercules around and pushed more power into her bottom thrusters.

The ship slowed and slowed until it finally came to a stop a few dozen metres over the roadway. Close enough that the jets beneath it were scraping away at the topmost layer of the road.

“One down,” Diana announced. She shot out ahead and up. The last thing she needed was to be caught stationary. That would make it too easy on the other two.

As she flew out of the streets, she glanced up and around until she spotted the two racers. The fighter was flying in a wide circle which would have it at her back soon enough. The mini-corvette was hovering over the parking garage, its side and bottom turrets opening up on the rooftop. Whatever return fire the vehicles down there had been able to send up had been stomped out.

“What’s the next target?” Diana asked.

“There’s a large shipyard two kilometres to the north,” ChaOS said.

Diana nodded. “Perfect.” She pushed the Hercules to go a little faster while locking on to the mini-corvette.

The ship must have had decent ECM, because it shoved itself to the side and its turrets snapped up towards the Hercules and started filling the air with cannon fire.

Diana wove around the worst of it and made sure to keep the lock on. “Two missiles, then two more; we’ll see if we can get through their point defence. I don’t want anything like an EMP, we might knock out power to some civilian that needs it.”

“Noted.”

Four missiles launched from the Hercules in two volleys. They raced around in big sweeping arcs, trailing smoke across an otherwise clear sky.

All four were batted out of the air by the mini-corvette’s point defence long before reaching the ship.

That gap did give Diana time to move though. She shot past and around the ship, cutting through the turn the fighter was making as she headed straight for the next objective.

There was plenty of time to bat some competition out of the air. There was a lot less time to earn points for herself.

“Mistress. We have Bolgian interceptors on approach, and some ships from the blockade are re-entering the planet’s atmosphere over the city. I suspect that every racer who could make it through has.”

“Well then, that just means that things will get even more fun, right?”