Tyro Vogel - Tyro Vogel's Extatica

She landed into a leather chair. The hatch slid closed. The only light in the cockpit emanated from the four screens in front of her. A Colt 1911 pistol was holstered next to the pilot’s chair.

The screen in the center glowed with the image of Victor’s walking tank directly ahead. The other three showed the view from the back camera and from each of the sides; switches, tumblers, gauges and indicator lamps of all shapes and sizes ran along the walls. Irina fastened her seatbelt and wrapped her fingers around the control joystick. She closed her eyes. She had to learn how to control this thing, and she had to learn fast.

Remember, she thought, I need to remember.

Another woman’s past flooded her mind. It worked. Her name was Lieutenant Irina Filidilupi and her squad swore that she was the most talented pilot to serve in the 1st Mechanized Corps Division. One of the jokers even dubbed her squad “Heavy Gear” because they were “deadly like heroin.” Irina took their word for it.

Images from her last battle flickered before her eyes.

Her hull was breached, her tank’s left weapon arm was reduced to a smoking stump, her minigun ammo belts hung empty at the machine’s sides. Her left leg had been immobilized and she had to use her jet thrusters to haul the tank to safety. And now here she was, none the wiser, ready to fight through another day.

Irina flipped the tumblers responsible for the heat sinks and activated the reactor. The walls vibrated with invisible might.

“Reactor online,” said the voice interface in the tone of a polite hostess. “Motion motors online. Weapon systems online.”

A beam of energy exploded from Victor’s main weapon, and a transparent shield sprung up in a blue half-dome before Irina’s tank, absorbing the damage, but the force of the shot sent the multi-ton vehicle sliding backwards onto the road. She hit a parked car, flipping it across the asphalt, and skid to a stop.

“What happened to ‘walk for twenty minutes in the other direction?’” she shouted.

Victor’s secondary weapon went bam, bam, bam as the anti-armor rifle hurled bullets the size of walnuts at her waning energy shield. Each time a shot connected, it pushed her further down the road, throwing her aim, shattering any hope for a proper firing solution. So she did the only thing she could: she fired blind.

The miniguns on her tank’s arms spun to life with a high pitched whistle as twin rays of fire and metal cut into the buildings around them. Even through inches of reinforced steel, Irina could hear her guns roar.

Apartment blocks folded on themselves as the miniguns made short work of the walls; a balcony, cut off from the building over the grocery store, crashed to the ground; something exploded. Some of her shots must have hit the target, because Victor’s tank shimmered blue, its shield deflecting the damage. She only had to hold him off until Mark got here in that heavy tank of his. It wasn’t impossible.

Victor fired. The beam shattered her energy shield and caught the tank in the torso. The seatbelt cut into Irina’s chest as the blast sent her spinning into a nearby house block. A part of the house collapsed into rubble. “Shields down,” said the interface.

“Shut up.” She routed all power to her thrusters and turned the throttle to the max. The tank glided into the air on burning streaks of flame, setting the half-destroyed building behind it ablaze. Irina hoped she had enough fuel to jump to the other side of the street to use it for cover. She needed to get off this road.

The third shot from Victor’s heavy energy rifle caught her mid-flight.

Everything flipped. Irina was falling.

The impact rattled the cockpit. Sparks flew in her face from the broken panels. The screens flickered with static, and it smelled like burnt wires. Irina was so disorientated that it took her a couple of seconds to realize that she hung upside down, her weight pressed hard against the seatbelts.

The vanity on him, she thought. Victor never, not for a second, considered the possibility of losing the truel.

Irina was getting sick of being pushed around. He had manipulated her from the very beginning and now he had put her out of the fight to make sure that she lived up to her side of the bargain. Except that if Mark won, they were both fucked.

Vic should’ve listened to her. Mark kicked his ass the first time she saw the two brothers meet, what made him think that he wouldn’t kick ass now?

Irina assessed the damage. The right leg’s pressure gauge cracked and a couple indicator lamps were lost in the impact, but otherwise the cockpit was in working condition. “Run repairs,” she told the interface. The snow crashed screens turned black, and came back to life with shaky images from the tank’s camera feeds.

Her hull had a gaping hole torn through the side, and her right weapon arm refused to respond to commands. In more positive news, she still had a third of her jet fuel left in the tank. She thought that if she wouldn’t have been so damn lucky, the cockpit could’ve smelled a lot worse than burnt wiring.

She was still alive, and that meant that Victor was otherwise engaged. This is a party I can’t afford to miss. Irina grabbed the joystick with her right hand, the jet throttle with her left, and prepared to do something stupid.

The thrust threw the walking tank back on its velociraptor-like feet. Irina held the throttle in place, rising higher. Fuel was at twenty percent. A feeling of weightlessness fell on her as she rose into the air. She could see into the square, where Victor dodged Mark’s devastating missile launches one after the other. She landed on a roof overseeing the square and waited. There was no margin for error; she had to time this flawlessly.

Victor used his jet thrusters to get around Mark’s tank and kicked a sedan car with his three-ton mechanized leg. The car flew into the air, heading for the back of Mark’s colossal tank, when Victor put a round from his semi-automatic into the car. It exploded into a fireball, engulfing Mark in flaming debris. Blue fire shot out of Victor’s thrusters, and his small tank torpedoed Mark’s in the back like a wrecking ball. Both vehicles collapsed on one another, bringing three houses down with them.

This is my chance, there might not be another. Irina gave the thrusters everything she had.

She hovered over the battlefield. Fuel was at ten percent. She didn’t have enough to make it all the way to the two fallen tanks. But then, she didn’t need to make it all the way. Irina adjusted the angle on the thrusters and burnt through the remaining fuel, aiming her tank’s feet at Victor’s glass cockpit.

The tank’s right leg smashed through the reinforced glass, its weight multiplied by inertia gained from the thrusters. Everything shook as metal crushed into glass and the flesh beneath it. Irina let go of the joystick and held onto the seatbelt as her tank toppled over. The display screens died, then the indicators, then every other light in the cockpit. The external microphones hummed with the sound of her fallen enemies’ engines.

Irina felt the darkness for the pilot’s sidearm. It was still there.

“IRINA?” said Mark through his tank’s speakers, “IRINA, IS HE DEAD?”

“I don’t know.”

“I CAN NOT HEAR YOU. THANKS, BY THE WAY. BUT I DIDN’T NEED SAVING.”

She switched her microphone on. “What now? We duke it out?”

“NO. THIS IS OVER. YOU HAVE TO CHECK ON VICTOR, THOUGH.”

“If he’s alive, he can hear us.”

“THE WAY THAT WENT, I DON’T THINK HE’D WANT TO BE.”

She unholstered the pistol and opened the hatch. Her tank lay on its side, making getting out as easy as stepping out onto the rubble. The two fallen vehicles lay nearby. A fresh paint of dark red, with a hint of entrails, covered the sides of Victor’s broken cockpit. Mark’s tank lay unmoving beside it. Irina climbed up to the older brother’s cockpit and balanced herself on the armored torso, slippery with his blood.