"Shrike One, we have a bogie at your 215, heading 014 at 5200k, altitude 14k."
"Roger that, Ground Control," I replied.
I nudged the Shrike's stick over, bringing the nose around to about 270. A twitch of the stick and I bobbed upward briefly to avoid an unusually tall tree, then leveled off again. I toggled the radar on the HUD up to its farthest-reaching setting. Nothing there but my wingman cruising at my 7 and the pair of Guardians running a similar patrol route a few klicks to the north.
That didn't mean anything, of course. A bogie traveling at better than 5000 kph had to mean a Marik aerospace fighter in re-entry, and it could quite easily move through my radar range quickly enough that I'd have trouble intercepting it.
"Ground Control, this is Shrike One. I need a heading."
"Shrike One, you are on course and inside the intercept cone," Ground Control replied.
I continued to scan the radar and watch for trees. Finally I got a blip just on the edge of the screen. I automatically glanced up into the sky where the bogie would be, knowing as I did so that it wasn't close enough yet to be visible.
I glanced back down at my console, then quickly back up, wondering if I'd been imagining the speck I thought I'd seen. I hadn't. It was there. I checked the range on the radar again, then looked up at the black dot clearly visible against the pale green of the sky, estimating size and distance based on the radar readings.
That wasn't any Marik fighter.
"Ground Control, this is Shrike One. Could you please identify this bogie for me?"
There was what seemed to me to be a guilty pause. "Err, Shrike One, your bogie is... that is, our sensors identify it as... a Gazelle class transport."
"A dropship, you mean," I shot back, then keyed off. Cæsar's balls. A dropship. 1000-plus tons of armor and weaponry, and a hold full of tanks, capable of achieving solar escape velocity. And here I was flying a completely unarmored tin can with all the evasive capabilities of a cinder block. And they wanted me to shoot the thing down.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to be calm. It was just like in the simulator. I'd practiced fighter intercepts dozens if not hundreds of times. I'd never even practiced a dropship intercept, but it would be the same thing, right? Except that the dropship was bigger. That would make it an easier target, right?
I wasn't convinced, but I told myself anyway. Just like the simulator.
The Gazelle was passing high across my course at an oblique angle, moving at far less than the 5000 kph Ground Control had first spotted it at, but still faster than I was going. And it was almost in gun range.
I eased the stick back, lifting my Shrike up away from the tree-line. I pushed the throttle all the way forward. The jet turbine below me laboriously came up to full power, lofting my gun-heavy fighter into the air at its pathetically low top speed.
This was my moment of most vulnerability. I was clear of the trees, a beautiful slow target, and I was still in the arc of fire of the dropship's main guns. If its gunners looked down...
Its guns opened up, stitching a network of beams across the sky. But not at me. At the same time, the flashes of light blooming along its hull betrayed the impact of high-caliber shells from my wingman's guns. Shrike Two rolled through its firing arc and away, apparently unscathed.
Then the Gazelle was over and past me. I rolled my Shrike in below and behind it, then hauled back on the stick, at the same time shoving on the throttle in a futile attempt to get more thrust out of the under-powered engine. The Shrike's nose came up, my velocity dropping towards a stall. The Gazelle moved towards the point in the sky where the firing lines of my twin guns met. Just like the simulator.
My speed dropped, my targeting reticule drifted towards the dropship. The Shrike's stall warning horn came on at the exact same moment the targeting computer started the beeping that signaled that there was a hard target in front of the guns. I ignored them both. I waited a fraction of a second longer for the targeting reticule to drift from the Marik ship's nose to its tail, then squeezed the trigger without conscious volition. Just like the simulator.
The thunder of the twin Mydron autocannons slung under my wings shattered my reverie. The simulator had never managed to capture that. No simulator sound system could duplicate the effect of a pair of the heaviest guns ever mounted on an aircraft firing in unison, eight feet away on either side of my fragile cockpit. It was a sound transmitted straight to my bones through the Shrike's airframe rather than through my ears.
I held the trigger down as the nose of my craft dropped with my speed, the targeting reticule following the glowing exhausts of the Gazelle perfectly. One of the dropship's thrusters winked out as my shells stitched it, then the rear of the ship was ripped by an explosion. The big ship rolled halfway over, greasy smoke billowing from its shattered drives. I watched in awe as it wallowed, wobbled, and finally managed to right itself as its helmsman fought for control.
I looked down to see what sort of terrain he was trying to make a dead-stick landing into, and almost gasped in horror. It was Nova Roma. The dropship's nose came up, in a last-ditch effort to avoid the buildings, to stretch its ungainly glide past the city, but to no avail. With no power, it never had a chance. It went in straight and level, belly-down, making an attempt to use a reasonably wide, straight road as a runway - for all the good that did in a craft with a 75 meter wingspan. The wedges of its wings cut like axes through the brick and mortar of the buildings that lined the street, driven by its immense inertia. Its starboard wingtip clipped what looked like a chemical tank behind an industrial structure, and the tank went up in a fireball, spewing flaming debris.
After half a kilometer or more, It finally ground to a halt, a 75 meter wide swath of rubble licked with flames and roiling smoke behind it. Untouched in the cockpit of my Shrike, I passed over the destruction my hand had wrought.
I understood now why my fighter had been named after a creature that was also known as "the butcherbird".
