The First Starfighter, Grace Goodwin [popular novels .TXT] 📗

over one hundred people. It’s never been attacked before. It’s too far away from Queen Raya’s fleet, and its exact location is top secret.”

“Apparently not any longer.” I moved the coordinates over into my system. “We’re only three minutes away.”

“There are three Scythe fighters, Jamie.”

I scoffed and plotted our route in the red glow. “Please. I took out a swarm of ten on the Moons of Menace mission. Ten. Three is nothing.” Throttling up, I had us moving at full speed within seconds. “And there are kids there. No one is killing kids. That’s not happening.”

Alex didn’t argue, just activated his weapons arrays as I did the same. He would control the heavy missiles and projectiles while I operated the line-of-sight laser cannons and sonar disruptors.

We didn’t need to bother with sensor jamming, as Gamma 4 had reported that the Dark Fleet Scythe ships had their jamming systems activated already.

Their jammers would completely hide our approach until it was too late.

Killing kids.

What were they thinking?

“Oh, they are going to fry.” No one had ever protected me when I was young. Hell, no one protected me now. I worked. I paid my bills. I took care of my damn self. That fact had made me more determined than ever to protect every child I came across who needed it. I’d been in a few screaming matches at parks with mothers not paying attention to their little ones. I’d even nearly gone to blows in an indoor playland when a group of older children were picking on a two-year-old baby boy and the parents did nothing. Nothing made me more enraged than someone picking on a child. Or a dog. Or kittens. Or…

Damn it. I just hated bullies.

I flew an arc around the nearest asteroid and came in behind the next asteroid where the Gamma 4 production facility was on my maps. As we neared, recognition clicked. “This is Gateway 4, from the game,” I told him. “Training, I mean.”

Alex shook his head. “Gamma 4. There is no Gateway 4 in the training simulation.”

“Yes, there is. I’ve seen this before.” I knew every nook and cranny, every outcropping of rock and the shapes of the marks on the asteroid’s surface. “I’ve seen this. In the training. But it was called Gateway 4. I had to fly in and pick up a kidnapped scientist before the bad guys took him through an interstellar transport gate.”

Alex shook his head. “No. It’s a production facility. Missile lock ready.”

Right. Back to business. But I knew this rock. And now that I’d seen exactly how much detail had been right as I’d played, I knew how I wanted to take on these Scythe fighters. “I’m going to swing up and over the base and come down on them from above. By the time they see us, it’ll be too late.”

As I spoke, a Scythe ship rocketed straight up directly in front of us.

My finger was firing the laser cannons before I’d even processed the fact that the ship was there.

It was gone seconds later, my starfighter blasting through the debris field like a bullet through a cloud of glitter. I didn’t blink. Barely even breathed.

“One down, two to go.”

Alex grunted. “That was visual only. There could be more.”

Good. I didn’t say it aloud, but I thought it. Killing babies was not cool. I was in autopilot now, the hours and hours I’d spent in the gaming chair making each decision and twitch of my body a reflex rather than a plan. The pounding pulse and adrenaline rush? That, too, was all too familiar. I didn’t have to think, which was good. All I had to do was hunt, and the Valor was an excellent hunter.

Our ship cleared the debris field, and I flipped us ninety degrees into a dive, doing a visual scan for the Scythe ships as I went.

“Velerion, this is Gamma 4. Shields have failed. Repeat, shields have failed.”

“Gamma 4, this is Velerion. Understood. Shields have failed. Commence lockdown.”

“This is Gamma 4. Lockdown order received.”

There was no answer from the frantic man who’d been updating his home world that his base was under attack. I hadn’t thought about reporting in to Velerion or Gamma 4 until now, which was stupid, so I opened a comm channel.

Alex immediately shut it down. “No. No comms. We’ll lose the element of surprise.”

“But they think they are going to die.”

“Let them. If you use comms, the Scythe fighters will be able to use our comm broadcast to pinpoint our location through their jammers.”

I’d never used anything but line-of-sight laser communications between ships in the game. This was different, but it made sense. “Fine. We go in quiet and take them out.”

“Agreed.”

“Kill box is mine.” The words left my mouth automatically, and I cleared my throat.

“I’ve heard that before,” Alex said. I’d recorded that command into the game, that and about a hundred more. Just like he had. I knew his voice. Apparently he also knew mine.

The screen in front of me had a large square grid that usually lined up with my actual field of vision. That square was my kill box. Anything I could see, I could hit with my laser cannons.

The rest were Alex’s to deal with, keep off us, or track until I took care of the immediate threat in front of us. With the advanced jamming systems on most of the fighter ships, scanners and tracking systems were useless in combat. If you couldn’t see it with your own eyes, you couldn’t kill it.

I completed the ship’s turn, and we were pointed down on top of both the small section of base that stuck out from the rocky front of the asteroid and the two Scythe fighters lining up to take their kill shots.

“Now!” I pushed the ship to top speed instantly, laser cannons firing on the ship directly in front of me. Its partner I trusted Alex to take care of. Which he did, landing a short-range, manually guided missile seconds after my laser