[Tabitha]

Battlestar Pacifica
137,000 km from Caprica, fifth in line of seven Battlestars
1/9/48 0800

Lieutenant Hobson Ingles never made the fleet celebration. He was busy flying another stupid CAP flight, bitching about his new wingman, who couldn’t keep in tight to his Viper. He looked over and again the nose of her Viper was at least thirty feet away, making it an easy target if a Cylon Raider were to come along and try to gobble up a lagging Viper.
He tapped the comm., for the hundredth time, and again requested that she rejoin the formation if she’s not too busy. He didn’t dislike her necessarily, but everyone knew she was a Socialator, and that was just hard to accept. Sure, she was pretty, some might even describe her as beautiful, but that one fact was like a stone in the heel of a pair of fine boots. It just rubbed until it wasn’t acceptable. The old model interceptor pulled back in tight and he went back to reading his PDA. It was a racy novel about two lovers trapped on an island where the women were amazons and used men for nefarious purposes. He grinned thinking of how he wouldn’t mind having the new Lieutenant use him for a few of those purposes. He giggled at the thought and was about to tap the screen for the next page when the Viper beside him vaporized. He sat stunned by the blast and just blinked, trying to comprehend what he just saw. To his other side, the interceptor was already turning; its more maneuverable design was responsible for making it possible to position itself for an attack run. He dropped the PDA and activated his own targeting computer. The computer identified his killer moments before his own Viper vaporized. He would have been glad to know that his Amazon dream lover had already targeted his killer and fired her first shots, had he lived long enough to see it.
Captain Rajah Mubaric ordered the immediate split of his squadron. His targeting computer identified the attacker as Cylon, but of an unknown configuration. It was smaller than a normal Raider, with one extremely large engine instead of the two medium sized engines. The canopy was long and slender, suggesting one or two pilots, one in front of the other, instead of the tandem design they used. The wings were not the disk shape; they were long and rectangular, with four guns at the wing roots. Currently, those guns were trained on him, and he pulled a highly advanced maneuver, flipping his Viper end over end, to face the opposite direction he had been going, and thrusting down and now to the rear of his former heading in full Turbo mode. The Viper shook harshly, making his nose itch and his body ache. He grunted to fight the GLOC that threatened to consume him in its deadly darkness. The guns of the new Cylon were not fooled, they blasted him into vapors.
The Raider paid for its kill, the interceptor had found a weakness and had damaged its port side guns. The Red Raider shuttered from the impact, however, the energy shield dissipated the energy guns blast as it was designed to do, and the Raider survived what would have been a direct hit. Again, it shook as the pilot of that Colonial Viper poured on the heat, blasting away with a show of skill that took even the Red Cylon pilot by surprise. Such a challenging foe was rare, and this one was not flying the book they issued to the pilots of the Fleet. This one was performing maneuvers that were new and amazingly dangerous. He almost felt joy, had he been able to feel anything, at the ensuing duel that followed.
For the entire duel, his Raider was flying to its limit. He pushed the prototype beyond its design envelope several times, and each time it groaned in protest, but succeeded in making the turn or dive that he demanded. He noticed though, that his guns on the port side failed him every time he tried them in the tight scissors pattern he and the amazing interceptor pilot were performing. He recorded the duel, intending to use it to train himself, since he felt that this pilot was extraordinary, and however the duel ended, there was much to be learned from this, assuming he survived.
He knew that his mission had been to take out the turrets covering the flight bays of the Battlestars, and that until those specific turrets were destroyed, the suicide Raiders, packed with solium, could not make their attack runs to destroy the fighter bays of the giant Battlestars. Still, he could not pull himself away from the duel he entered with this interceptor pilot. They too seemed unable or unwilling to quit the duel. It seemed that only one of them was going to survive this day. He focused his second brain on the task of killing the human pilot, and his efficiency improved marginally. The tactics of the human altered, however, and they began to perform beyond the abilities of the interceptor model. He was impressed, a human capable of enduring the deadly gravitational effects of the maneuvers they were performing. He had never hoped to meet such a foe, but now that he had, he felt what he could only classify as reluctance to kill them. This was different from the mission he had flown only days before. Then it was to kill the squadron known as the Black Asp’s, and that mission had been tough, but not like this. Then, he had total surprise, and they were tired, worn out, and unable to put up much of a fight. To their credit though, even exhausted as they were, with muscles knotted from far too long in a sitting position, half awake from the nearly twenty hour long flight, and the state of total shock, being attacked only minutes away from their base, they fought well. He had to really work to earn it, and the lessons learned from that fight served him now. He learned not to go after the leaders first, but to hit the middle of the flight, cutting it in half, which made it less likely they would regroup and defend. It was a lesson well learned, since two or three of these Vipers were possibly a match for him. The final kill he recorded that day was the toughest, and he delighted in its glorious fireball as it entered the planets atmosphere. The Asp’s were no more, and the secret of the solium connection was kept a few more days.

Tabitha wasn’t sure exactly what she was doing; her hands seemed to take on a life of their own. She was pulling the stick around, yanking and banking, turning and burning. Her fighter was an extension of herself, and they tumbled as one, like her gymnastics, only in space, and in an effort to kill a machine that had just killed her friends. The detonation of Battlestars around her didn’t even faze her, she was focused only on avenging their deaths, and nothing was going to stop that.