In every space holodrama, you could rely on an arm chair critic to point out that you couldn’t hear noise in space. None of those critics ever pointed out that, for all the silence beyond the cockpit, the interior of a Starfighter was so noisy you could hardly hear yourself think. The main thrusters rattled though the frame, a dozen sophisticated computers buzzed and clicked, the cardio-centrifuges whired with the whine of dentists drills. That didn’t even take into account the gimbling of attitude jets and gun pods, the subsonic pulsing of the sensors, the wheeze of air circulators, or the crackle of comm traffic across a dozen frequencies. For the most part the noise was handled by integral headphones in flight helmets which generated a rough reciprocal to the exterior soundwaves. Unfortunately this didn’t do anything to muffle the hammering in the chest of a pilot about to go into action.

“Bravo leader to all Bravo Elements, thirty seconds to contact,” Lieutenant Miranda Cykali, adjusted the gain on her plot position display, a holographic 3D tank which displayed the position of her eight ship element and the eleven incoming bandits. In the distance she could make out the intermittent flashes of heavy capital ship weapons against the star field. Bright blue white blooms on the black background. The fleet was slugging it out, great mass drivers hammering away at each other with a will. The status of various fleet elements was listed in a sidebar on one of the six holographic screens which formed a hemisphere around her but she ignored them. Other peoples problems weren’t big on her list of priorities right now, not when she was about to engage a superior force with her understrength squadron. The 222nd Fighter Squadron, or the ‘Double Taps’ as the jaunty nose art of two upended shot glasses, declared, were an intercept outfit and that was their current task. A trio of Leto class heavy bombers were behind them, in the process of setting up there launch profiles to begin firing their payloads of torpedos into the distant fleet engagement. Big the Leto’s might be, nearly 90 meters from stem to stern, but their specialist role made them vulnerable to fighter attack.Miranda had seen on more than one occasion how effective the quartering fire could be against heavy ships, unfortunately the enemy commander must have been similarly informed.

“Twenty seconds,” she read from the intercept screen, a mass of vectored lines and scrolling numbers that translated in her head to the mix of speed and relative acceleration that all pilots learned to compute in their heads. The enemy machines were falchions, broad flat heavy fighters, a little longer and massing a little more than the fifteen meter long pulsar’s that the 222nd used. The falchions were more heavily armed and armored, but the pulsars were more maneuverable and had an edge in acceleration. Tactical parity the briefing officer had called it.

“Gypsy I’ve got a slight shimmy in the stick,” Bravo Two, Jenny ‘Jynx’ Randall reported. Jinx had earned her call sign by experiencing more than her share of luck, mostly it was bad luck, but on occasion it could be spectacularly good. Miranda was Gypsy because she was supposed to be able to read the fortunes of war. It wasn’t true, but then she supposed a statician would point out that Jynx wasn’t really cursed. More than once one of Miranda ‘bad feelings’ had proved warranted, and you didn’t need much with people as superstitious as fighter pilots tended to be. Miranda turned and looked out the starboard viewport. Jynx’s figher, Bedlam Bell according the mural of a voluptuous woman with wild hair and crazy eyes, was twenty meters away and flying steady. Whatever the problem was it didn’t seem to be with the exterior control inputs.

“Hold it together Two,” she advised. It was a bad time for it, but there was never a good time for bad luck.

“Squadron,” she said, triggering a switch to the squadron wide comm circuit, “Switch to lances and prepare to engage.” She put words into action, toggling the weapon selector from the central ‘gun’ position to the downward ‘lance’ setting. There was a soft whine as the capacitor banks came online, charging the twin plasma lances in the nose pod. Lances were a directed plasma weapon, capable of ripping a bolt of strontium plasma down range at close to the speed of light. They were slow firing, thanks to the long capacitor recharge time and the need to cool the barrels after each blast to avoid pitting, but they had their advantages.

“They are launching,” someone said breathlessly over the net, Miranda could have found out who by checking her comm record but it hardly mattered. The yellow dots of incoming missiles blossomed from the rapidly approaching red dots of the approaching falchions.

“Ignore it, ten seconds,” Miranda ordered. Missiles could be very effective in a dog fight, but head to head at zero deflection it was a waste of munitions. As if to underscore the point, one of her point defense units spun to life and a bright flash appeared a hundred meters away, the small high yield laser swatting the weapon out of the air. Similar flashes appeared across the axis of advance and the computer reported all incoming as shot down with a pleasing ping of the combat computer. The targeting reticule lit up and Miranda made a slight adjustment to her course bringing her weapon to bear on a magnified view of an incoming falchion. Her heart thundered in her chest and she felt cold sweat under her black flight gloves. No sweat, I’m still in the game.

“Open fire,” a voice far too calm and relaxed to belong to her ordered and her thumb stabbed the firing stud. Both capacitors discharged with a sharp crack-crack, syncopating each other by a fraction of a second. Light so bright it would have burned an unprotected retina, ripped from the gun mounts of all eight fighters. One of the enemy fighters, the one she had been aiming at, exploded, the fuselage shattering in a savage detonation that flung its wing like protrusions in opposite directions.

“Scratch one,” Jynx crowed. By standard practice both wingmen would aim for the same fighter in an attack like this but there was no time to check the computer to see who had scored the killing shot. Another of the enemy fighters was hit, an ugly score across its fuselage venting gas at a slow trickle. The other shots hammered into shields dissipated more or less harmlessly. Light twinkled from the onrushing formation and bright actinics burst across Miranda’s cockpit. Red light flashed in her holo display. Shields out, but no damage. Someone screamed over the unit push, but whether in pain or fear Miranda didn’t know. All eight indicator beads were lit and green, but that didn’t mean a pilot hadn’t been killed when her cockpit had been blown to atomized shrapnel. No time. Still in the game. The two fighter elements flashed passed each other at speeds that were literally astronomical. Jynx dropped back slightly, covering her CO with her shields, although the chances of another lance shot were minimal. Attitude jets slammed her against her crash harness as she spun the fighter, still moving with the same speed and momentum but with the nose pointed off at a 45 degree and slightly upward angle. Upward had no real meaning in space, but was defined as away from the ecliptic of a system. The main drives flared to life and the G-force hammered her back into her chair. The whine of the centrifuges howled to the pitch of a diamond saw and she tasted bitter citrate in her mouth as they pumped fluid into her body, keeping her blood pressure up and warding off the danger of blood clots with short lived anti-coagulants. It wasn’t great for your health, but admittedly it was rather low down on the morbidity and mortality list for combat flyers.

“Break and engage by pairs,” she snapped, cutting her thrust, rolling to port to line up a shot and firing her lance again. The enemy was already breaking, jinking unpredictably with quick bursts of maneuvering jets and the shot went wide. Miranda centered her axis and punched the throttle back up, feeling the vertiginous grip of gravity reasserting itself. The enemy was breaking too, whipping around as fast as their delta-v allowed. In theory they could have swept on towards the bombers, but that would leave them with a long burn against faster fighters that would be ripping them with low deflection lance fire the whole way.

“Guns hot,” Miranda ordered, switching the weapon selector with her thumb. She fired a quick burst at empty space, warming them and ensuring there were no last minute freezes. Lances were fine at range, but fired two slowly for close range work. Additionally shields had no effect against kinetic weapons. Continuous jolts from her attitude jets kept her movement non ballistic as she rolled upwards through the dog fight. The comm net was alive with excited chatter.

“Come up to three-seven… break right… watch that bandit … cant shake him…” It was a wash of confusion that likely didn’t help anyone in any way other than making them feel like they had a modicum of control in a chaotic storm of death. A falchion flashed through her sights and she squeezed off a burst, too late, then dove onto the tail of a bandit as it juked out of the line of fire of one of the pulsars. Her sights lit green and she stabbed the trigger. Both gun pods whired, spewing glowing depleted uranium shells into the enemy machines tail section. It came appart like a paper mache hit by a lawn mower. One of the power plants lit, scattering the remains in a detonating spray, pieces of debris pinging off her hull as she raced past.

“Scratch one,” she grinned, whipping herself up onto one wing to avoid a stream of retaliatory fire.

“I can’t…” the voice of Bravo Six, Mayfly, cut off in a burst of static.

“Six is gone!” her wingman screamed, her voice anguished. Dear Sir I regret to inform you that your daughter died gloriously/was torn to bloody rags by a lucky shot in a nowhere star system.

“Keep it tight, seven form with eight and…”

“Scratch one,” someone else crowed, wiping away the little tragedy memorialized only by a red led on Miranda’s control board. Something exploded off to her right and she rolled towards it ducking under the expanding gas cloud. A bullet spanged off her port side, the deflection too high to allow for penetration and she juked away by reflex.

“I’m hit, I’m ahhhh…” a blood curdling scream ripped out over the comm, dragging on and on. Miranda dumped the signal from the comm a moment before the bead representing Bravo three went red. Dear Sir I regret to inform you that your daughter died gloriously/burned alive as her cockpit superheated around her. Something smashed through Miranda’s cockpit as she climbed towards another falchion, it flickered off one of the interior circumstances and punched back out through the cockpit. A second blow hammered the side of her bird and the cockpit displays went dead. The force of it hammered Miranda against the side of her cockpit, helmet gouging her neck.

“Gypsy? Gypsy?” Jynx called anxiously from far away, breaking the new found silence that had come with the fleeing atmosphere. The sound of her breathing came back a second later and she slapped at the side of her helmet. Dear sir I regret to inform you that your daughter died gloriously/suffocated in her crippled fighter… no, she was still alive. Still in the game. She hit the remote stud on the side of her helmet and an abbreviated version of her HUD winked to life.

“I’m good,” she responded, ignoring the mass of red warning icons. She steadied her fighter with drunken touches of her attitude jets. There was too much rotation in port three, far too much. She had no idea how to take it offline without her full suit of controls.

“I’m good,” she repeated, a prayer rather than a sit rep.

“Gypsy incoming, break, break, break!” someone shouted. She slammed the throttle to the gate and hammered port three, spinning away so erratically that the centrifugal force squeezed her eyes to gray. Nothing in a fight was more tempting to the enemy than a wounded bird, if Gypsy couldn’t extricate herself in the next few moments. Port three exploded, pitching her fighter into a drunken spin on all three axis. The cardiofuges must still have been active or she would have blacked out rather than nearly vomiting into her helmet. Dear sir, I regret to inform you that your daughter died gloriously/drowned in her own stomach contents…

“They are breaking,” someone shouted.

“Keep them under fire…” someone, Miranda maybe, ordered. Relief and nausea flooded through her like a sheet of frozen spring water. She might be in an out of control spin in a crippled fighter, but she was still alive. Hours of waiting and worrying, days of operational planning and briefings, and it was all over in thirty seconds of concentrated violence. But this one was over and she was here to see it. Still in the game. This time at least.