Lasting longer than a few minutes in a battle of this size wasn’t easy. Evading enemy fire required lightning-fast reflexes, wicked spatial awareness, and a gift for pattern recognition. You had to learn how to find the best route to cut through the enemy’s ranks, retreating and attacking simultaneously.
Once I’d spent enough hours studying how the Sobrukai ships moved and attacked as a group, I gradually began to see the patterns hidden in all that chaos. Sometimes they moved like a flock of birds, chasing its own tail as it circled for a landing. Other times, they made sharp turns in the sky, like a school of predatory fish. But there was always a pattern to it, and recognizing it allowed me to anticipate the enemy’s movements and reactions, and that made it relatively easy for me to get them in my sights—as long as I was listening to the right music. Music was key. The old rock songs on my father’s old mixtapes were perfect, because they had a steady, hard-driving beat that served as my mental combat metronome.
I cut my engines and fired my retro-thrusters, swinging my ship around 180 degrees without altering or slowing my forward momentum. Then I opened fire on the swarm of Glaives converging on the Icebreaker’s tail with a series of bursts from my sun guns.
When I hit my first target, it imploded into collapsing fireballs of superheated plasma in front of me, and a message flashed on my HUD informing me I’d made the first kill of the engagement.
“One down, a few million to go,” I announced over the comm, already buzzing with adrenaline. Killing videogame aliens had always been an outlet for my adolescent frustrations—but tonight it felt as though I was venting compressed rage each time I pulled the trigger.
It didn’t matter that the Sobrukai were fictional—I still wanted to kill every last one of them.
“Guys, I’ve got two Glaives on my tail,” Diehl announced. “Any help?”
“Help yourself, pal!” I heard Cruz say. “We’re all getting our asses handed to us!”
“Not me,” I replied. “I am officially in the zone.”
I scanned my scopes, but neither Kvothe nor Dealio were currently visible, because the Icebreaker was now directly between us. I fired my lateral thrusters and did a series of diving barrel roles to evade the incoming barrage of plasma bolts streaking past me on all sides. I also teased the throttle to vary my ship’s speed and angle of ascent, while I lined up my omnidirectional laser turret’s targeting reticle with a new threat—a train of three Glaives I’d just picked up on my tail, looming on my HUD’s aft display.
The moment I got a targeting lock on the leader, I thumbed the laser turret’s trigger. The beam only lasted for a split second and it wasn’t visible with the naked eye, but its exact trajectory appeared on my HUD. I watched as it burned through the hull of the Glaive closest to my tail, then continued burning on through the other two Glaives directly behind that one, destroying them in a rapid chain of explosions: Boom! Boom! Ba-Boom!
I powered down my already overheating laser, then switched back to my plasma cannons, which automatically reoriented my HUD so that it showed what was in front of my ship, instead of the dissipating fireball in its wake. Then I threw the throttle wide open. But as I passed under the Icebreaker and prepared to swing up on its opposite side, two more Glaives reappeared on my tail. They dropped in directly behind me and I started to take heavy fire, knocking my shields down by half and putting even more of a drain on my power cells, which were already dangerously low.
According to my HUD, the Icebreaker had been firing its melt laser for less than a minute, and the Sobrukai had already destroyed nearly half of our Interceptors. Reinforcements were still pouring out of the Doolittle’s hangar, but these drones were all piloted by players who had already gotten themselves killed once, and most of them would be destroyed a second time within seconds of rejoining the battle.
Cruz was right—we weren’t going to be able to hold them off long enough.
“Screw this,” I said. “I’m gonna try and create a diversion.”
“Where are you going?” Cruz said over the comm. “Protect the Icebreaker, dumb ass!”
“Sorry, Cruz!” I said, pushing my throttle forward. “But you’ll never guess who just showed up. Leeeeeeroyyy—”
“Oh, Lightman, don’t you even dare!”
“—mmm-Jenkinsss!”
I broke formation with the others, leaving the Icebreaker behind as I moved to attack the nearest Dreadnaught. I slammed my throttle forward and crossed in front of it, strafing the turrets spaced along the sphere’s equator, taking out one or two of them.