Baker was clear, speeding away, and Jaeger scrutinized his display as he scanned the darkness for the source of the light. That had looked like someone flashing a laser pointer, could it be some kind of laser weapon? No ship in the fleet used such a device to his knowledge, their range made them useless at the distances that UNN ships usually engaged at. They would also scatter in an atmosphere, severely diminishing their lethality beyond a few feet.
"Thanks for watching my back there, Bullseye, that was a hell of a shot."
"That wasn't me," he replied, turning about and making for the edge of the asteroid field. As curious as he was, he didn't want to be sitting around scanning when more Bugs showed up.
"If it wasn't you, then who was it?"
"I don't know, it looked like some kind of laser."
The radar was next to useless, it was impossible to distinguish ships from random pieces of rock. But if something had been firing off lasers, then it should show up on the thermal scans. He kept an eye on the display as he maneuvered between the asteroids, hoping that he could find something before he went out of range. There! A heat signature, the red blip appearing on his HUD. He turned his head and zoomed in on the area of space. He couldn't see anything, just blackness.
As he stared, there was a flurry of colored lights. They flashed in a wave, blues and purples moving from left to right like a neon sign outside a nightclub. It illuminated something metallic, a ship maybe, but it was so far away and so faint that he couldn't get a good idea of its size or shape.
"What the hell is..."
He couldn't keep his eyes on it, he had to focus on the asteroids that were currently flying at his face. Hoping that the mysterious weapon didn't start firing at him too, he followed Baker to the edge of the Oort cloud. When they were clear of the asteroids, the reinforcements appeared, joining them in formation as they made their way back to the Rorke.
"You guys took your sweet time," Baker complained, "you missed the fight."
"Don't tell me that Bullseye actually hit something," one of the other pilots said, it sounded like Boomer.
"He saved my ass is what he did."
"This time I'm only about seventy-five percent responsible for saving Baker's ass," Jaeger replied. "There was something out there, something I've never seen before."
"What are you talking about?" Boomer asked. "Some kind of new Bug design?"
"Well, that too, yeah. But there was a ship out there, colorful, I don't know how to describe it. Something fired a laser weapon that destroyed the last Bug ship that was tailing Scorch, melted through it like a blowtorch. I saw the beam hold on it for a few seconds, and then it vanished. I picked up a thermal, but all I could see were these weird, flashing lights."
"Who uses laser weapons?" Scratcher asked skeptically.
"Nobody that I know of," Jaeger replied. "Maybe UNNI is testing something new out here?"
"The Ninnies?" Baker added, "no way. If anything, a laser weapon sounds like a downgrade over what we already use."
"Maybe they found a new way to focus the lens or something?" Boomer suggested, but he didn't sound very convinced.
"When we get back to the carrier, I'll see if my cameras picked anything up," Jaeger said. "If I saw it, then something must have shown up on the video feed."