“Goddammit, Zack!” Cruz shouted. “Every time! Every goddamn time!”
I grinned and fired my thrusters, putting my fighter into an instantaneous vertical dive, with the intention of slipping under the sphere to strafe its shield. This maneuver cost me nearly a third of my remaining power, because my Interceptor had to momentarily activate its inertia-cancellation field to execute it. But I shook several of the Sobrukai fighters off my tail, because they needed to execute the same move to stay on me, and most of them didn’t have enough power. Instead, they had to fishhook around behind me, then try to get a bead on my Interceptor again—when I was already gone.
Another swarm of Glaives emerged from the nearby Dreadnaught, all diving at the Icebreaker in a straight line, firing in tandem. I shredded them with a single sustained burst from my sun guns, bringing my Sobrukai kill count up to nine. Not bad, but also not up to my usual standards. My aim was a bit off.
“Shit!” I heard Diehl shout over the comm. “I just lost my gorram shields because I’m already out of frakkin’ power!”
“Dude,” Cruz said. “You shouldn’t mix swears from different universes.”
“Says who?” Diehl shot back. “Besides, what if BSG and Firefly took place in the same universe? You ever consider that?”
I heard a thunderous series of explosions behind me and swung my head around just in time to see the IDC Doolittle erupt into a huge fireball amidst a hail of enemy plasma fire.
“What did I tell you?” Cruz muttered into his headset. “There goes the carrier, and the rest of our drone reserves.”
“Yeah, and that goddamn Icebreaker still isn’t finished making its stupid ice-fishing hole, either,” Diehl added. “Game over, man. Game-the-fuck-over.”
“Not yet,” I muttered.
Clenching my teeth, I swung my Interceptor back around and returned to try to help defend the Icebreaker, targeting the cluster of Glaives attacking its aft thrusters—but I couldn’t get a lock on any of the targets flashing on my HUD, because I kept having to dodge incoming enemy fire, as well as friendly fire from the sentry guns on the Icebreaker’s armored skin as my drone skimmed over it.
My drone took two more direct hits, knocking my shields down to fifteen percent. One more hit and they would fail, and my weapons would follow soon after. Not good.
I jammed my flight stick forward, cutting into a sharp dive to avoid flying right into the beam of the Icebreaker’s pulsing melt laser. Ignoring AVA’s warnings about my drone’s imminent power failure, I gunned the throttle and continued turning into a barrel roll, both sun guns still blazing.
“Shit!” I heard Diehl curse. “They got me, guys. I’m out.”
I glanced at my HUD just in time to see Diehl’s Interceptor vanish off my scopes.
“Me too,” Cruz added a second later. He unleashed a colorful stream of profanity on his comm and logged out of the game completely.
The digital deaths of my two best friends distracted me just long enough to take another series of direct hits, causing my shields and weapons to fail. I immediately initiated the self-destruct sequence on my drone’s power core, even though I knew it was unlikely I would last the seven seconds required for it to complete.
All of the Glaive Fighters in the vicinity began to redirect their fire at me, hoping to destroy my core before it could complete its countdown and go critical. But in doing so, they were momentarily forced to take their focus off the Icebreaker, just as I’d hoped.
Five seconds remaining on my drone’s self-destruct sequence. Then four, three—
But that was when the inevitable happened—the Icebreaker finally took one hit too many and exploded directly beneath me. The ensuing fireball destroyed my drone, along with every ship within its blast radius.
Ominous music began to play in my headphones as the words mission failed appeared, superimposed over my now disembodied view of the Sobrukai armada, as each of the six Dreadnaught spheres began to recall their remaining drones and return to their original formation in orbit, with this minor threat to their world now vanquished.
I blindly powered off my game console and sat in the darkness for a moment before pulling off my VR helmet and returning to the real world with a sigh.