Диана Дуэйн - Storm At Eldala

The rail cannon was up to sixty-five. Just a few minutes, he thought. Come on, Sunshine, just a few minutes more—
It all happened at once. The three ships broke formation, two to the right and above, one below and to the left. Enda concentrated on the two. Gabriel fired at the one but missed. He felt the scorch raking up Sunshine's underbelly, and then he felt another bolt hit. He yelped, the ship lurched upwards, possibly saving them both from being killed right then, but another bolt lanced down from above, hitting the rail cannon.
It blew. Gone, the rails twisted all askew; it wouldn't fire anything now.
The englobement dissolved as the other little vessels registered the destruction of the one weapon that had been keeping them at a distance all this while. It was gone now; they could swarm in and take Sunshine at their pleasure.
Enda was firing nonstop. Gabriel was firing at anything he could see, and the fury was helping again. Along with the utter terror, he was burning with the knowledge that they were both about to be killed. It was amazing how life became not less intense at such a time, but more so, a fury of life, ready to burn itself out but not give up.
One hit, then another, blowing up so close to Sunshine that the entire ship shook, but it was not going to be enough. More plasma bolts came stitching in from behind, and Gabriel cried out in agony and rage as one of them hit the engine compartment.
Then came an intolerable glory of light off to one side, a burning pain all up and down Gabriel's side, as if someone had thrown burning fuel on him. He rolled Sunshine away from the pain. He had just enough power left in his emergency jets to do that. The first light had just been the "pilot" detonation. Now came the secondary one, and Gabriel squeezed his eyes closed tight.
The little ships were fleeing in all directions, but six of them were caught together as the squeezed nuke went off. The remainder knew they had no chance against Sunshine even damaged as she was. They kept running.
Space grew still and dark, and in it Sunshine drifted, tumbling gently and losing power. Gabriel sat there gasping in the darkness of the fighting field as the power ebbed away, the weapons losing what little charge they had left.
"Okay," said a gravelly voice from out in the darkness. "That went pretty well, I thought." "Helm," Enda said sternly. "You were not supposed to do that." "Aw, Enda, you're too rough on the two of you."
Gabriel knew what the words meant, but he found them hard to believe at the moment. It's the software,
he told himself. But his brain insisted that he couldn't let down his guard, that something terrible might still happen. Those little ships were only fighters. They could not have come all this way by themselves. Somewhere around here was the fortress ship or dreadnought that would have dropped them. It could not be allowed to find Gabriel and Enda, not alive—not even dead and in one piece. The pilots of those little ships were reminders enough that there were some fates worse than death.
"All the same, we cannot be constantly relying on overarmed allies to come sweeping in out of the darkness to save us!"
"I thought that was what you kept me around for."
Even through the fear, Gabriel had to grin. "He's incorrigible," Gabriel said, still gasping for air. "You should know that by now."
"Maybe I should," Enda said with a sigh. "Meanwhile, let it go now, Gabriel. This has been enough exercise for one day. Shut it down."
Gabriel reached out in the fighting field to the glowing collection of virtual lights, indicators, and slider controls that appeared within his reach. One slider well off to his right was pushed right up to the top of its course. He reached out and pulled it down.
Reality ebbed out of everything. The blackness of space melted away to the virtual gridlines of the system's training mode . . . and it was all a dream. Gabriel's muscles unknotted themselves for the first time in about five minutes.
"Better?" Enda said.
"Much."
"Then come out of it, now. I do not see why you feel you must drive yourself so hard, just for an exercise."
"It's a human thing," he said, taking another breath for the appreciation of it not being his last. "You wouldn't understand."
He could sense Enda putting her eyebrows up. A couple of moments later Gabriel was alone in the field. He took his time about getting out, shutting down instruments, making gunnery safe, and checking the pieces that purported to have been made safe. It was not that he didn't trust Enda, but partners checked one another's work when weapons were involved. Besides, said that nasty hard-edged part of his mind, someday you might have to do all this yourself. Get used to the possibility now so that when it catches you by surprise, you will survive. She would want it that way.
He finished his checks, then made the small movement of mind that folded the fighting field away from him. A moment later he was sitting in the normal lighting of Sunshine's narrow cockpit looking over at Enda.
"Helm," she said as she unbuckled her restraints, "do not change the subject." "I got tired of fighting for their side," Helm said. "Besides, you were winning."
"You should have let the business take its course regardless," Enda said. "That is the purpose of these
exercises, so I am told." She glanced over at Gabriel, who was wiping the sweat off his face.
"How did we do?" he said to the air.
"Twenty-six minutes," said Helm. "You should be pleased with yourself. It's precious few engagements that run much longer than fifteen these days, especially with numbers like that. You're getting a better tactical sense, that's certain."
"He is also running himself ragged," said Enda, watching Gabriel mop himself up with the cleaning cloth that he had started to keep by his seat for these exercises. "Are you all right?"
"I was nearly dead, I thought," Gabriel said, still finding it hard to talk without gasping for air. "Boy, is that real. It's worth it, even if I do hate it more than anything."
"Well, you were the one to discover how effective it is," Enda said, levering herself out of the left-hand seat and standing up to take a good long stretch. "It is not my fault if the 'deep limbic' implementation of the fighting software deprives you of any sense that this is a simulation. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the programmers at Insight."
"They'd probably just say that there's no difference between a simulation and the real thing if the simulation's real enough," said Helm. "Like to see some of them out here testing the software under conditions like this."
Gabriel made a face.
"It might be amusing," Enda said to Helm. "Anyway, I do not see that it makes the experience of fighting any less useful for Gabriel if, during the fight, he feels as if is real. Surely that should sharpen one's reactions. The more frequently that particular reaction is sharpened—the terror and coping with it—the easier it should get for you, or so it seems, from what I know of human habituation training. Am I wrong?"
"Not in the concrete sense," Gabriel muttered. "I just don't like to have to do the laundry after every session."
"You do the laundry after every session anyway," Enda said, wandering out of the pilot's cabin and back toward the little living area, "whether we work out in limbic mode or not. Sweat, you keep telling me, is something no marine can ever put up with."
"The problem's not the sweat," Gabriel said, more or less under his breath. Then he laughed and pried himself out of his seat.
Even though he had been using the fighting field every day for six months now, it still sometimes came as a shock to Gabriel how cramped the cockpit felt by comparison when he came out. The beauty of the Insight "JustWadeln" weapons management system was to make you feel as if you were the ship—moving freely in space with your weapons available to you in the form you liked best.
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