Conflagration

Major Tolbert

Lyssa's wrists and ankles ached from the restraints, but the medicine the medic had given her was helping her headache. She was no stranger to a stun stick. She'd been popped by enough of them over the years, usually by police. Usually when she'd deserved it. Usually.

She began to hear something, a low, shrieking rumble from the south end of the lake. The pirates could hear it too. They all turned and looked to the south.

"Here they come!" one of the lookouts shouted.

As the sound got louder, Lyssa's trained ear could identify the engines making it. Noster 482s, she thought, three or four of them. Fighters She wanted to see, but she was laying on the wrong side for that. Trussed up like a hog for slaughter as she was, it took a lot of effort, but she managed to get herself turned over. The men standing guard over her either didn't notice or didn't care that she turned herself over. They were momentarily distracted by the incoming fighters too. Across the water to the south, Lyssa could see the fighters⁠—there were four of them⁠—coming in fast. They were skimming the surface in a tight V-formation.

"I hope those are friendlies," she whispered to Erin whom she could see now that she was laying on her other side.

"I don't think anybody on this planet's friendly to us," Erin said.

"Shut up, you two," said one of the guards.

The four fighters buzzed right over the platform, their engines shrieking. The pirates all covered their ears. Erin and Lyssa, with their hands still tied, were obliged to just wince at the pain. Immediately after buzzing the platform, the lead fighter broke off from the other three. Lyssa heard the pilot pull his engine back to idle as he broke up and to the left, spilling off airspeed in a tight turn. Go ahead, dipshit, crack your wing spars, Lyssa thought derisively. Ever hear of metal fatigue?

The pilot shut down his main engine and didn't bring his vertical thrusters online right away. A fighter is built for speed and agility, not gliding. Without his main engine or vertical thrusters, the pilot was forced to pull the nose higher and higher, exchanging more and more speed for lift. All the while, he held the plane in a tight, left turn all the way back around towards the platform. Anybody who knows anything about airplanes knows you can only do this for so long before the wings get too slow to produce lift. That critical airspeed below which a plane can no longer fly without vertical thrusters is called the plane's stall speed. A fighter, with it's minuscule aspect ratio has a very high stall speed. The tight turn the plane was executing only increased the odds of a stall. "Come on, dumbass," Lyssa said aloud, "stall it right into the water." She knew it was too much to hope for, but she loathed nothing so much as pilots who were hard on their planes just for the sake of showing off. It would have made her day to see this guy stall and crash. "Come on, numbnuts. Crash."

"Goddamnit, Fangs, I said shut up," repeated the guard. He brandished the butt of his rifle at her, so she shut up. She resolved right there to make these guys sorry they'd ever met Lyssa Ruiz.

Just as the fighter was about to stall less than fifty meters from the platform, the pilot brought his vertical thrusters online and smoothly transitioned to hovering flight. His remaining forward momentum carried him the rest of the way to the platform while the vertical thrusters provided a smooth, controlled rate of descent. The landing gear dropped out of the fighter's underside just at the last second and the pilot set the plane down on the platform's small landing pad. It was the kind of cocky flying that a pilot or some other species of idiot might think was cool, but Lyssa thought was just stupid.

"That's pretty cool," said the guard that had just told her to shut up.

The fighter's canopy opened and Lyssa saw right away that the pilot was no he after all. She was an older woman (which to Lyssa meant perhaps forty). The pilot climbed out of the cockpit and onto the wing. Her flight suit was a couple sizes too big and rolled up at the cuffs. To Lyssa, an avowed believer in the "less is more" school of thought, the oversized flight suit only made the woman even more sexy. Where her left hand should have been, only a claw-like, three-fingered mechanical prosthesis protruded from her sleeve. She took her helmet off and tossed it nonchalantly into the cockpit seat. She only had hair on the right side of her head, long, raven-black hair shot through with streaks of gray. The left side of her head was covered in one continuous burn scar that disappeared beneath the collar of her flight suit. Where her left eye once had been, a black, orb-like ocular implant now resided. The ocular implant was a little unsettling as it seemed to be looking in all directions at once, yet no direction in particular. Like a bug's eye.