Now that the odds had been evened out, Jaeger felt a surge of excitement welling up inside him. This was he had trained for, what he lived for, six degrees of freedom and enough firepower at his fingertips to reduce a whole squadron of Bugs to worm food.
"Keep drifting out, let them follow us, we'll lead them straight into range of the frigate. Focus fire on the fighters, ignore the carrier!"
The three Beewolf fighters opened up in unison, even the railguns having to lead their targets at such extreme range and velocity.
The Bugs scattering to make themselves harder to hit as the distance between them was bridged by lines of tracer fire and missile trails. Jaeger watched as one of the missiles found its target, the Bug erupting into an explosion of viscera and tangled metal, another succumbing to a well-placed railgun salvo that must have hit some kind of critical system or organ. It spewed yellow goo from its wounds, the liquid turning to glittering crystals as it froze.
The fight was not entirely one-sided, however. The Bugs still outnumbered them, the Beewolfs forced to dodge a hail of glowing projectiles. One of the organic vessels loosed another torpedo, the weapon locking onto Scratcher and hurtling towards him.
"Out of flares!" Scratcher shouted, breathing heavily into his helmet as he tried to evade.
The missile was agile, Jaeger tearing his eyes away from his target for a moment to watch as his friend's ship burned away in a dangerously tight arc. It was risky, Jaeger could see that he was pulling too many Gs, the torpedo shooting bursts of gas from its nose and tail as it turned to chase him down.
"Eject Scratcher, eject!" Jaeger shouted as he watched the torpedo close. There was no way that he could outrun it, the Bug weapon leaving a sparkling trail of propellant in space as if marking its path.
"I got it!" Scratcher replied, his voice straining as he endured the acceleration. In a few seconds, he wouldn't be able to eject. He'd be unconscious, and his drifting vessel would be destroyed anyway. "I got it ... I got ... fuck!"
Jaeger breathed a sigh of relief as he watched the canopy pop off with a burst of gas, the oxygen contained within turning into a cloud of frozen crystals, the ejector seat propelling Scratcher clear of his doomed vessel on a plume of flame. Not a second later, the Bug torpedo hit the Beewolf. A billowing cloud of green energy engulfed it, the black chassis slagging like a plastic toy being melted under a magnifying glass before the fuel tanks exploded.
The wreckage continued on, sparkling metal and molten hull material spraying into the void.
"I think we're in trouble here, Bullseye," Baker muttered.
"Where the hell is the Baskeyfield?"
"New contacts on radar," Jaeger said, failing to conceal the alarm in his voice. "I'm picking up four, no, five contacts heading towards us at high speed."
"I see them," Baker confirmed, "they're not coming from inside the asteroid field. They're skirting the edge of it. That formation is tighter than anything I've ever seen..."
"Try and get a lock on them," Jaeger said as he rolled his vessel upside-down, narrowly avoiding a trail of plasma rounds.
Baker was right, they were in trouble. With two fighters down, they had to contend with three or four Bug fighters each. That was a tall order, even for him. "Fuck, watch out! Another missile!"
One of the remaining fighters released a projectile that had been clutched against its belly with its spindly legs, another plasma torpedo speeding towards Jaeger. His HUD flashed a warning symbol, alerting him that it was locked on, an ominous red blip appearing on his map.
He gunned the main engine, veering away as he popped his flares, the bright beacons reflecting off his glassy hull as they spread out in their wing pattern. The corners of his vision began to darken once again, his suit tightening like he was being vacuum-packed, his every muscle straining as he pulled the flight stick back.
The missile was only temporarily distracted by the flares this time, quickly finding his scent again and barreling towards him as they faded.
"It's on me," he hissed through gritted teeth, using his thrusters to corkscrew his ship in an attempt to throw off his pursuer. It was smaller than him, faster and more agile, without an organic pilot to limit its maneuvers. His finger hovered over the emergency eject button, his mind fogging from the lack of blood, his railgun taking potshots at the closing missile and failing to hit the slim target.
A green beam of light was projected from the darkness, his video feed pixelating and corrupting, holding on the missile with perfect accuracy. It melted through the housing, a burst of escaping propellant sending the torpedo spinning off course. Jaeger struggled to turn his head, his bleary eyes widening as he located the source of the laser.
There was a formation of ships speeding towards the fight, his visor zooming in on the distant objects. It wasn't Bug reinforcements, it was the aliens that had come to Baker's aid the day before. Their ships looked like rounded, aerodynamic arrowheads, the hulls sleek and the points of their stubby wings upturned. There was a canopy towards the pointed nose, but he couldn't make out anything inside at this resolution.
The vessels were painted with speckled grey-blue camouflage, as if designed to make them harder to spot in an atmosphere, and along their flanks were the colored panels that Jaeger had spotted during their last encounter.
They almost looked like LCD panels, running from the nose to the tail. As he watched, the lead vessel sent a wave of flashing light along its body like a cuttlefish. The other ships in the formation reciprocated, waves of indigo and deep purple flashing in the darkness.
Could they be communicating with one another?
They were flying in such close formation, they couldn't have been more than a few meters apart. In space, that was close enough to be in spitting distance, and the coordination required could only have been matched by a trained aerobatics team.
As he watched, each of the five vessels produced a beam, the green lasers focusing on a single Bug ship. The target vessel immediately slagged and burst into flames, the heat igniting the gasses and fuels contained within it like pouring gasoline on a fire. The formation shot past like a bullet, more flashes emitted by their strange color panels as they banked in perfect sync, coming around for a second pass.
"Hold your fire, they're friendly!" Jaeger warned.
"You think I can't figure that out for myself?" Baker shot back, "keep firing!"
The tables had turned, and Jaeger engaged the nearest Bug ship with renewed confidence as the mysterious aliens targeted another with concentrated laser fire.
The Betelgeusians seemed confused by the sudden appearance of the aliens, breaking off and splitting their attention between both targets. It took some of the heat off Baker and Jaeger, the pair firing their engines as they moved to support the strange fighters.
"Look how they're flying!" Baker marveled, "it's like an airshow."
The alien formation split into two groups, veering off in opposite directions to take on different targets, it was like watching a carefully choreographed dance. Jaeger fired his cannon at one of the distracted Bug ships, the rounds hammering it, drawing a long and bloody trail across the length of its hull. He swooped in to finish it off with a few railgun shots, zipping past the drifting carcass with only a few feet of clearance.
"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!"
The battle was turning in their favor now, the Bug squadron was in disarray, but Jaeger's excitement was soon marred by the looming shadow of the carrier.
The giant lobster came into range, blocking out the light from the nearby star and casting him into darkness, Jaeger twisting his stick as he avoided its bulky body by a hair. He watched through his canopy as the segments of its long tail whipped past overhead, looking over his shoulder as the thing barreled forward.
Baker and their new allies mopped up the remaining fighters, the last one succumbing to a well-placed missile, the fragments of its ruined hull tumbling end over end as they hammered into the side of the giant carrier.
The behemoth was unfazed, its long antennae twitching and its glittering eyes pivoting as it tracked the enemy vessels.
What was it going to do next? Its complement of fighters had been shot down, and it didn't seem to have any ranged weapons with which to fend off the Beewolfs and the colorful aliens.
Jaeger and Baker kept up their railgun fire, peppering the thing's armored shell, the aliens pulling back into a formation of five as they drew burning trails across its hull with their lasers.
Nothing was getting through, that shell could be meters thick, they would have to count on the frigate to deal the killing blow.
"Shit," he exclaimed, "the frigate!" He switched channels, trying to contact the incoming vessel before it arrived, it must be right on top of them by now.
"Baskeyfield, come in Baskeyfield, this is Bullseye." No reply, fuck. "Baskeyfield, come in!"
"This is the Baskeyfield," a distorted voice said, Jaeger exhaling the breath that he had been holding in.
"Baskeyfield, we have friendly aliens on the field, do 'not' target them. Repeat, we have friendly aliens on the field. Target only the ... the big fucker. Do you copy?"
"We copy you Bullseye, 'big fucker' is on our radar. Repeat, eyes on big fucker. Suggest you get clear of the engagement zone."
Jaeger turned his head this way and that, searching for the incoming frigate. There, a massive heat signature on his scanner, closing fast. He got a visual on it, zooming in to see the frigate's massive engines flaring at full burn, four nozzles arranged in a diamond shape that were spewing superheated gas as bright as a sun. It was coming at them ass-first, decelerating using its main engines, probably already locking torpedoes on the Bug carrier.
"Get clear," he warned, "the torp boat is on station."
Baker didn't need to be told twice, spinning and putting his engine towards the carrier, burning away from it. The aliens were still doing passes, Jaeger had to find a way to get their attention. His mind raced, he couldn't just leave them here to potentially be caught in the crossfire, not after they had saved his ass. Think Jaeger, think!
He thumbed a button on his control panel, turning his nose towards the formation of arrowhead fighters, flashing his floodlight at them. They seemed to like light, maybe they would respond to it. He could practically feel the bulk of the Baskeyfield bearing down on them, he couldn't linger here for long, shining his beam and wiggling his wings as he let momentum carry him.