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Brutus, The Spartans, Two AIs and the Pirate Fleet (Part 5)
Posted By: Traumatised Marine<rbecalick@hotmail.com>
Date: 22 November 2003, 7:09 PM
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Brutus wanted to jerk the controls, and vent some of his frustration into them, but the design of the Seraphs controls did not make that applicable. He had to sit, with his claws rested upon the arms of his pilot seat, as the Seraphs controls were simply a set of buttons and switches at the end of each chair arm. The manner with which he had to control the fighter therefore looked like he was reclining on a sofa seat. The buttons and switches were responsive and accurate once one learnt to use them, but they also felt static to the actions they controlled.
He pulled the Seraph into an ever tighter loop, trying to evade the Longsword he was training with.
The Longsword Pilot was cruelly adept at piloting his craft, and Brutus had heard the enraging 'ping' that served in this training exercise to symbolise a fatal hit to his craft. Three times already in this training exercise he had heard that sound.
He was determined that he would not hear it again.
His opponent's Longsword was, in theory, not as manoeuvrable as his Seraph, but the Pilot in the Longsword did not seem to have any qualms with pushing the craft far beyond its specs limits, even though this was only a training exercise. So Brutus found the craft still on his tail as he urged his craft into a tighter yet loop.
He growled in exasperation, and in a spontaneous decision typical of that that comes naturally to a veteran of the battlefield (though Brutus was yet to see combat outside of his training) he crashed the sublight engines down to 20% and ripped the Seraph out of the loop-the-loop. The Longsword tried to tail him, but there wasn't the time, and in an instant the Longsword Pilot had flashed from having the Seraph fighter in his sights to being nowhere to be seen. Such was the problem of dogfights in vacuum with sublight craft, one didn't appreciate the speeds one was going at. One second you could be about to hit your opponent, the next your target had vanished.
Brutus knew he had moments before the Longsword would have tracked him, he pulled the Seraph into a tight turn. He didn't intend to tail the craft, the Longsword had already pulled an evasion manoeuvre that would make it very difficult to follow after, and was now beginning an arc towards him. Instead Brutus contrived to pull a trick that was virtually impossible in a space fighter dogfight, due to the speeds. He brought the holographic target of the Seraph upon an apparently empty bit of vaccum. He waited perhaps a few fractions of a second, timing with supercomputer-accuracy. Then he pressed the fire button. Instead of issuing searing blasts of pulse laser, which would have been most satisfying, the Seraph gave a 'beep' to signify he had fired his 'virtual shot.' All he actually did fire was a long distance infra-red beam, designed to be picked up by a sensor on the Longsword, to let the Longsword Pilot know if he'd been 'hit.' And as the Longsword pilot brought his craft in a tight arc towards Brutus, he flew right in to the infra-red shot. The Pilot heard a 'ping' sound to tell him that he had been 'killed.'
Brutus switched on a general frequency comm and gave a resonating victory roar. He had switched on the comm so the Pilot would hear his triumphant cry.
The Pilot replied with a laugh,
"Don't sound so pleased with yourself Brutus, I'm still winning three to one here!"
Brutus responded to this by resettling himself in his pilot seat, determined to turn this training exercise the other way.
He began waiting the obliged five seconds with his engines at 50%. The rule was that if you scored a hit, you had to give your opponent time to get a safe distance away before the fight could restart.
However Brutus never got the chance to resume combat, as suddenly his comm crackled,
"Brutus! Dalberge!" It was Captain Gustav of the Carrier 'Firestorm.' "Drop what you're doing and get back to the Firestorm now! Reach is under attack!!"
Without a word to one another Brutus and the Longsword Pilot Dalberge were rocketing back towards the hangars of the 'Firestorm.'
An escort of Marines were having difficulty keeping up with Brutus as he loped his way towards the Bridge. Brutus had had to suffer the annoying presence of an escort of Marines nearly everywhere he went. Maybe it was because he was so precious to humanity, maybe it was because no one could bring themselves to fully trust a being whose species was of the Covenant, perhaps it was a bit of both. Brutus gave it no more thought as he clomped his presence into the bridge. The bridge personnel normally stopped and stared for a few moments when he came to the bridge, yet now they were too busy at their stations, Brutus realised the situation must be quite important.
Captain Gustav was a relatively young man considering his rank, clean-shaven, and devote to his cause, and in a way unremarkable- the ideal UNSC servicemen.
Gustav swung around to see Brutus and he frowned.
"All of us knew that inserting you into the Covenant military was going to be hard Brutus. This might be the opportunity we've been waiting for. We could not have had a more ideal bit of chaos than a clash at Reach for you to slip into the fray unnoticed. I suggest you get back into your Seraph and into space now. That Seraph has infinitely more accurate Slipspace navigation than this Cruiser," Gustav gestured at the bridge of the Firestorm, "You'll be able to enter normal space right outside Reach. Hopefully you'll arrive while the battle is still raging." He paused, considering something, then proceeded, looking very grim,
"I don't think we need to fool ourselves, a huge Covenant armada has arrived outside Reach. I think there is a strong chance that Reach is going to come off worse, despite it's defenses. Once the Covenant ships recall all their fighters, with a hell of a lot of luck, you'll just be able to park yourself in one of them and slip in unnoticed."
Gustav paused again, then gave a slow salute. His heart must have been very heavy.
Brutus returned the salute, and seeing no time for sentiment, raced back to the launch bays and his Seraph, followed by the tag-along Marines.
A voice addressed Brutus over the comm of his Seraph.
"Brutus, I'm going to send you the coordinates for the Slipspace jump. Note that once you're out that launch bay door we're going to be altering course, and coming from another direction. It'll look suspicious having a Covenant fighter and a Huma-"
Brutus cut him off by giving an irritated, guttural bark to let the anonymous voice know that he was not stupid, but was eager to get under way.
The response was an obediently quick opening of the launch bay doors, for a few seconds the air inside the hangar rushed out, then silence. Brutus' Seraph looked so peculiar within the human hangar and among the Longsword fighters. Brutus paused for a moment, staring at the vivid stars through the yawning hangar door, they were beginning to drift as the Carrier was already preparing to change course. Brutus activated the Seraph's engines, and the Seraph shot noiselessly out of the hangar.
Turning about to get Reach in his sights, Brutus saw the planet on his view screen. It was a distant, unremarkable speck of light, and Brutus would have dismissed it as a star were it not surrounded by holographic runes and markers from his view screen.
And yet, this was too close for the Slipspace generators created by humans to make a jump practical. Because in truth, humans had a semi-chaotic means to navigate Slipspace, and could not understand the physics of that universe. Meanwhile, although humans could not work out how from stolen examples of their technology, the Covenant had mastered Slipspace, and could jump with perfect accuracy.
Sending the coordinates through, he engaged the Slipspace generators, and watched the view of the stars melt, warp and tear as he entered Slipspace.
Brutus was delighted with his luck, he could not have come out of Slipspace in a more ideal position. Nearly directly in front of his Seraph was a human destroyer, looking very battle-damaged, fleeing from the pursuit of a pair of Covenant Frigates. All the while the human ship was being harassed by a swarm of Seraph fighters. Longsword Fighters stalwartly trying to keep them at bay in the face of greater numbers. It seemed that the peak of the conflict was over, and the remaining human ships were breaking formation and scattering.
Brutus sent his own Seraph shooting into the fray, the more time he spent with his Seraph drifting alone the more suspicious it would look. Luckily, nothing seemed to be paying attention to him so far.
It was only once he was amongst the other Seraph fighters that he truly contemplated the significance of what he was going to have to do to remain inconspicuous. He tried to think of it merely as another training exercise as he sent his first blasts of pulse lasers exploding through the first Longsword, blowing and scattering it's hulk into molten-hot chunks. However there was no way he could pretend those pulse lasers were the harmless infra-red 'laser-tag' beams he had used in his training.
And so he was forced to continue; strafing the destroyer and opening fire on the Longswords while trying to outmanoeuvre them when they tailed him.
Several minutes into the pursuit of the dying Human warship a small klaxon sounded inside Brutus' cockpit, sounding more like a melody on a celestial organ, it still oddly conveyed a compelling sense of warning. Suddenly Brutus became aware that the other Seraphs were breaking away from their pursuit and beginning to take a course back to the main Covenant fleet. Brutus hurried to keep up as he watched the two Covenant Frigates move in to finish off the crippled Human Destroyer.
The swarm of seraphs drifted towards the Covenant carrier, entering it through many large yawning hangar bay doors along it's sides. Brutus piloted his own Seraph into one of these, desperately observing how the other Seraph pilots were docking so he could do the same without looking too unpractised and conspicuous. Now in the hangar, he found himself fitting into a hovering, single-file queue of fighters. The line steadily decreased as the fighters manoeuvred themselves systematically, one by one, into cells in the hangar wall, like some giant iridescent, curved honeycomb. When it was Brutus' turn, he awkwardly reversed his craft into one of the cells, his ship clipped and then grinded slightly on the edge of its entrance. Brutus hoped he had not blown his cover with this blunder.
He opened the hatch to find a short, slightly curved ramp aligned with his hatch on the top of his Seraph, the ramp came down from the ceiling of his ship's docking cell, and led up through a sort of curved trap door.
Brutus climbed through, went along a passageway, and came out into a wide walkway, with a stream of Elite Pilots walking across it. Brutus slipped inconspicuously into the flow of Covenant Pilots.
Brutus flexed his jaws happily. It looked like he was in.
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