#vargheist

“What the hell, Rau? You trying to melt the processor?” Mickey calls out, willing herself to fly towards them. “How long have you been—”

“Quiet!” Rau says, glancing back. “It’s coming.”

For a moment, Mickey falls silent, her lips pulling back off her fangs. “You’re running simulator drills against this thing? We could've used some help with the hull repair—”

“There,” Rau shouts, pointing to an orange spark in the distance. All at once, the fighter squadrons pull into multi-g turns and converge on their target. One after the other, the capital ships discharge their primary railguns, electric arcs leaping between paired magnetic tines. Positional data is fed to Mickey’s nervous system as proprioceptive input so she can feel the kinetic munitions sailing out into space, swerving toward their target under power of their miniaturized thrusters. A sea of blue sparks ignite as the fighters fire their own railguns in unison, creating a wall of guided thumbtacks between the planet and their target. Soon, there’s so much tungsten flying that the proprioceptive feed feels like meaningless static.

“Just watch,” Rau says, transmitting command impulses to the simulated officers and pilots of the fleet. “I’ve been escalating all afternoon, throwing larger and more sophisticated forces at it.”

“Yeah, for what purpose?”

“Just watch, Mick.”

She shakes her head, pulling up a HUD to highlight the details of the battle. Rolling back to sit cross-legged, she glances over to see Hunter pull up beside Rau, lounging with his hands behind his head.

Under Mickey’s HUD scope, the orange spark resolves itself into a long missile with twelve interception lasers along its body, driven by a pair of rotating omnidirectional thruster rings. Squatting on its nose is a demon of neon light, all claws and teeth, with a mane of glass razors pouring over its shoulders. Hunter clicks his tongue, and Mickey feels her lips come apart. “That’s—”

All at once, the missile’s interception lasers begin spitting red needles into the cloud of thumbtacks. Each tack vaporized is replaced by two more, the fighters dropping acceleration to invest power towards cycling their guns.

A pulse of thrust pivots the missile hard, pointing it into the center of the cloud. Then, its thrusters swivel back to drive it into a dizzying burn down the planet’s gravity well. Bursts of precise thrust carry it in jagged lines, lasers intercepting tacks seemingly at random while the missile evades others by a hair’s breadth. One tack comes within a hundred meters, and Mickey’s eyes go wide as a millisecond pulse from a maneuvering jet swings the missile’s tail neatly out of the way. Her HUD lists the tack’s closest distance to target as two meters. The demon, eyes darting between tacks as it directs its laser fire, stops to look at Mickey for a moment. Its face splits into a jagged smile.

“It’s a Vargheist. Pared down, simplified to fit on a compact platform, but there’s no mistaking it,” Rau says, hands flying between interface panels as the missile approaches. “I haven’t been able to stop it. Not once.”

“So what?” Mickey says, trying to keep her voice steady. “It can fly like this in theory. Real combat is always more complicated.”

“Shit, simulation or not, I’ve never seen anyone fly like that. Spirit or organic,” Hunter says. Something about the respect in his voice makes Mickey uneasy.

The Vargheist streaks through the fleet under thirty gees of acceleration, faster than the cruisers’ railgun turrets can swivel to track it. An instant later, an antimatter blast blooms through the planet’s atmosphere, light so intense that Rau halts the simulation and brings up filters to keep the input safe. Rau yelps as the demon flickers into existence centimeters from their face, and Mickey makes an involuntary motion for the sidearm on her belt back in hardspace.

“I win,” it says.

_________

Around 1000 words, had to trim this one down some! Done for @flashfictionfridayofficial's prompt, "Against the Flow." Tried to do a (sort of) standalone piece for the prompt based off a longer sci-fi story I'm messing around with, titled Vargheist. Anthro cast for fun, riffing on Star Fox a bit.