The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Sixty-Five

DELTA TEAM LEADER -29:18

The red blips on his screen cavorted and twisted like hallucinating fireflies as Wash’s face became locked in a permanent sneer. His laser capacitors had overheated twice now, forcing him to dump reactor coolant into their heat exchangers to keep them from exploding or melting a hole in the fuselage at an inopportune time. He hadn’t touched his missiles since the Bandits –four of them – had closed on him. They were just too close. So he had to slug it out with them in a classic dogfight, laser to laser, the aerospace equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

The pack of drones that whizzed by was running on combat algorithm – he could tell by the way they flew. It was a sophisticated algorithm, and one he had learned to respect early on, but it was a machine code every bit as inflexible and uncreative as the protein sequencer in Serenity’s galley. The up-side to that was he was free to exploit that inflexibility in his flying. The down-side was the fact that the drones did not make the inaccurate and imprecise errors a human pilot did. All in all, he was just as glad that they were flying by program – his extensive “combat” experience in the arcades and consoles of combat flight sims was almost exclusively against machines.

The only difference here was that the machine could kill him, not just take his two bits.

With four-to-one odds it took an impressive amount of attention to his flight path to avoid the coherent lances and occasional mines that the drones threw at him. Of course the advantage was that he didn’t have to worry about hitting a friend, whereas twice now he had set up a pattern that had his foes scoring minor hits on each other. It was gratifying, if not decisive.

His own lasers had carved generous slices out of his opponents, but they were well-armored and sturdily built. It would be a battle of wits and skill that decided this contest. Bank, dive, climb, bank, roll, fire, juke, bank juke climb bank